User manual

There is one more aspect to be considered - the projectors are placed at
different “geographic” locations in the world, and sometimes a certain amount of
“driving” is needed until a view that allows selection of the needed projectors appears.
As this is a potential threat to usability (since the user might lose the original view and
the idea, while she selects all projectors to apply a value to), the top section of the left
panel shown on Figure 42 is planned – although, as mentioned, it is not yet
implemented. The idea is that all projectors are organized into groups, according to
location – and each group features two subgroups, A and B. By clicking these buttons,
the user would be able to select all projectors within a group/subgroup, and be in a
position to quickly apply values to groups of projectors, while at the same time having
a wide view, which would make the projectors impossible to select with the mouse.
Finally, there is one more feature residing in the right panel, which actually is
not related to a projector selection, but instead to a global feature – and that is the
day/night slider – whose purpose is to change the ambient light conditions in the
world (currently, it only changes the background sky texture filtering – the
background sky effect is obtained by using Sky Around BB in Virtools, and the slider
simply changes the gray amount of the Filtering Color parameter of this BB). The
feature is useful; as it would allow the students to visualize different ambiance
conditions when their show is being performed live at the event.
Figure 47. Virtual day (left) and virtual night (right) in a virtual world
This concludes the discussion about projector selection and editing, and the
accompanying right panel.
"DMX Director" - Architecture of a 3D light-programming application, in a multi-user Internet environment
64