Progress: Fixes and Issues

The good news is that Silo is now working! The bad news is that I had it right all along and the university was just blocking my apache server. Three hours of frustration for a simple fix, but at least it works now. I also read through both the code for the chat logger and the code needed to send data out of SL and into Silo, and it looks like the changes needed are pretty straightforward. I hope to have the chat logger working and sending data to Silo by the end of today. My advisor has been investigating the other end of the data chain, getting data from PHP to Max/MSP via OpenSound Control, and that has been going well. Data is flowing through the chain, though we are still figuring out how to format the messages so we get the result we want from Max. All in all, the chat logging trial has been going well, and I hope to have a working proof of concept by the end of next week.

The video tracking has been moving along, but I'm afraid I may have hit an impasse. Despite the fact that I'm doing this work on a 2.33GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor, I'm almost maxed out on CPU power while running both Second Life and my video tracking patch. I know the major problems are jit.desktop and cv.jit.faces, but I'm not sure what to do with them to reduce the CPU strain. The video is split into four quadrants, and right now the face tracking and demo audio are only running on one of the four quadrants. If the CPU is already near maxed out, then it would probably kill my computer to have all four quadrants tracking faces with full audio effects resulting. I've already disabled the Use Onscreen option for the jit.pwindow objects, inserted some speedlim objects, and taken out a few redundant things; I'm not sure what else I can do. I'm going to go through the Cycling '74 forums to look for advice, but I'm really afraid that it's going to come down to needing two computers: one for tracking and one for audio. I'm very opposed to that option, since one of my main goals was to make this project as mobile as possible, but if that's what it takes then so be it. We'll see if it needs to come to that.

- M