[chuck-users] mouse position

Kassen signal.automatique at gmail.com
Thu Oct 23 04:29:38 EDT 2008


2008/10/23 Joel Matthys <jwmatthys at yahoo.com>

> Actually, this is an interesting question. Hid tracks mouse motion rather
> than mouse position, so it's not so easy to create a ChucK patch that
> depends on the mouse's position on the screen. (ie trigger a sound when the
> mouse is in the upper left hand corner.)
>

Indeed, the cursor position is something to be dealt with by the graphical
shell of the OS, not the HID device. They are related but still different
things. It would be interesting to be able to poll the OS for various
things; it's there to take care of the basics, as far as I'm concerned it
can earn it's stay... the downside is that I understand that calls to the OS
tend to be slow and typically not realtime; some realtime OS's have been
made but the large two OS companies don't seem to think this is particularly
important. There are realtime versions of the Linux kernel (and running one
can make lots of sense for ChucKing) but I'm not at all sure that also means
the X-windowing system will be rt as well.

On the other hand; some pointing devices *do* have absolute locations;
tablets and touch-screens do and in that case the absolute position on the
tablet should correspond to the absolute position of the mouse pointer and
that's something we *could* poll HID for. Another potentially interesting
angle might be the touch-pads on most laptops. I could see Laptop-Orchestra
style uses for reading absolute locations from those as well as data like
the amount of pressure used. Sadly the more exciting features are there, the
less likely they'll be to be standardised. Multi-touch surfaces would be
great to be able to talk to, as would be pressure sesitivity (finger
drumming, anyone?) but I'm sure we could support those things (where
available) across devices and OS's.

Yours,
Kas.
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