Virtual Panorama

I am looking to make a panorama display for a monitor that is mounted to a drive with positional data.
I’d like to be able to move the TV displays through the “Virtual Panorama” and have my monitor act as the viewpoint for this panorama.
Is this a possibility?

Yes, this is possible. You’ll need a way to give the orientation of the TV to TouchDesigner, so some sort of gyroscope that sends data over the network such as what is available in smartphones.
You’d use this orientation data to change where the camera is looking so it’s looking at the correct part of the panorama.

The TV is mounted vetically and set to move up and down through the (vertical) panorama space. Ideally we shouldn’t need gyroscopic data?

If it’s only moving on one axis then a more simpler way to measure the movement can be used ya

My biggest question here is: Are there any references for a sort of virtual panorama that I could consult?
(not totally sure about how to begin)

Is it a large 2D texture that you want to crop and send content to the screen or is it more complex than that? 2D textures are all done in TOPs, so you should learn more about those. If it’s more complicated then you’ll want to do it with SOPs which are the geometry and 3D components. You’ll need CHOPs to handle all the control data.

I’d suggest just learning TouchDesigner a little bit first, it’s hard to approach how to solve problems in TouchDesigner if you aren’t at least a little bit familiar with it.

It looks like for now it will be in TOPS (either a movie file or an Image) I think I’ve put together something for the display, Now i just have to look into CHOPS and DATS to figure out how to get all my information into TD, communicating and issuing commands. I am looking into those now. Thanks for the insight.

I’m still rather unsure how to get my motion data into Touch Designer, what sort of connection would be needed in order to pass RealTime positions to TD as a motor moves linearly?

You could do this with any number of sensors. You might use a rotary encoder and then pass the data into touch as serial or as OSC (assuming you handle this with something like an arduino). You could also use a cellphone with an acceleromitor and gyroscope to get some information about when you’re moving and in which direction - though this will be a little less precise.

What’s your background with other sensing and input devices? It’ll be easier to make a suggestion based on what you’re already familiar with.

It looks like ARTNet would be an ideal connection. Any tutorial references I could find for Artnet capabilities?

My apologies - I was a little vague previously.

Your pipeline probably needs:

sensing hardware - rotary encoder or gyroscope and accelerometer combination, this might be a combination of sensors with an arduino or the like, or an old cell smart phone or iPod Touch.
communication protocol - ARTnet / OSC / etc.
transmission medium - could be a wireless solution or wired solution. Wireless will mean that you’ll need to make sure your devices are on a network.
routing (optional) - if you’re using wireless transmission of data.
computer for TouchDesigner - this will receive your data, and alter the signal sent to your display
display - in this case it sounds like a TV

With that in mind you’d use your sensing solution to pass information encoded in a given format over to touch - wirelessly or wired - where it would be used to change your image.

An example of what that looks like with osc can be found here:
[url]https://matthewragan.com/2013/06/15/vizualizing-osc-data-touchdesigner-2/[/url]

This is from 077, but all of the principles should still hold.

Thanks Ragan,

I think i got most of this figured out now. I have my control console now spitting out the MM positional data through DMX/ARTnet

Now I just need to figure out how to configure TouchDesigner to find the ARTnet data

the DMX CHOP can be set to use Art-Net as the interface - I think should do the trick for you… fingers crossed.

See also:

[url]http://www.derivative.ca/wiki088/index.php?title=DMX_In_CHOP[/url]

[url]http://www.derivative.ca/wiki088/index.php?title=Art-Net[/url]

Right, I’ve got that but it looks like there may be a problem with the Art-Net Net setting and the Artnet subnet setting.

Any descriptions I find for these parameters claim it isn’t an IP address, and I can’t seem to get a good understanding of how to determine these values.

I can see my packets running through Wireshark, is there some method where I can derive my values from there?

I haven’t used art-net in touch much - though usually what I do when I’m first trouble shooting / learning a new op is set up a broadcaster and a receiver in touch to get a handle on how touch works with the the data, then move to working with another device. If I have a second I’ll see if I can get a touch only example put together.

Got my data coming into TD and configured properly to match the control console positions of my TV.
Turns out my problems were related to the fact that Art-Net net/sub/univ all correspond to the Universe. Once i had that setup all i needed to do was select specific channels so I could actually SEE the data. Considering the DMXin was “showing” so many channels they were resized so small they were virtually invisible.

Now to configure my TOP display.