[ODE] pan tilt camera in ode

[Ed Jones]

Howdy,

[bear in mind that I know nothing about "Adaptive Behaviour and Cognition"!]

I don't think this is specific to ODE, but your proposed method sounds 
fair enough to me.
I've done similar things in the past to implement rear-view mirrors in 
cars and remote cameras on missiles.

Bear in mind that, depending on how good your agent's eye-sight is, what 
they see won't necessarily be what the end-user sees.
For example, you might turn off textures, lighting, specular highlights, 
reflections, fog, etc. Especially if your agent has infra-red vision.
Also, you probably wouldn't need the same resolution as the screen, you 
might be displaying 1024x768, but your agent's eyes can only see 320x240.
If you've got a decent 3D card then virtually all the 'computation' can 
be done on the GPU (you might have to re-cull stuff on the CPU), the 
most expensive operation (at least on Wintel machines) will be sucking 
the pixmap back out of the framebuffer on the card, reducing the 
resolution of the agent's eyes will help a lot here.
You'd probably want to use other tricks like; using low-poly versions of 
your models, utilising VBOs, and bringing the far clipping plane a lot 
nearer.

Anyway, I'm rambling, we're probably off ODE specific stuff and beyond 
what DrawStuff can do, so I'll stop.
;-)

Cheers,
Ed.


Thomas Riga wrote:

>Hi,
>
>I want to implement a pan-tilt camera into my ode project, so as to
>provide my simulated agent with vision. The most obvious way to do it is
>to adjust the viewpoint with dsSetViewPoint to the coordinates and
>orientation of the agent's head, draw all objects, and then use the
>resulting bit map as visual input. But this seems rather computationally
>expensive. Does any of you know better ways to implement a vision system
>with ode?
>
>Thomas Riga
>Adaptive Behaviour and Cognition Research Group
>School of Computing, Communication and Electronics
>Room A301 Portland Square Building
>University of Plymouth
>Drake Circus, Plymouth, Devon, PL4 8AA
>UNITED KINGDOM
>+44 1752 233740 (voice)
>+44 1752 232540 (fax)
>thomas.riga at plymouth.ac.uk http://www.tech.plym.ac.uk/soc/staff/triga
>
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