Re: Feature proposal: Alternative input system based on low-cost webcam

[Olivier Le Thanh Duong <olivier lethanh be>]

To give my 2cents and recenter the discussion a bit since I think it
would be a nice feature to have in Gnome3 (but keep in mind that's
just my opinion from informations I gleaned from the eViacam website
and that I'm not volunteering to do any works on this)

As I see it right now the problem is not really wxWidget, gstreamer or
sourceforce but that the whole feature is implemented in one big
monolithic application in one separate UI, providing it's own always
displayed toolbar, etc.. as a result including it as is won't fit in
the whole Gnome experience, especially given that's an accessibility
aid that interact with the whole desktop and not a separate
application that user launch, use and close like inkscape.

To integrate this feature properly in Gnome and make users feels like
it's truly a part of it, I feel like the application would need to be
split in several UI components connected in the right places in the
Gnome UI and a service which would read to the webcam and do the head
tracking.

That would give the following UI parts :
- Configuration dialog for eviacam, since it's a settings global to
the desktop it would make sense to have it in the control center.
- A dialog which show the webcam output with overlay, for
feedback/testing purpose. That's configuration and can probably go in
the control center applet too.
- Indicator elements and buttons to simulate mouse clicks, since they
need to be always showed up when the service is enabled, it would make
sense to have them in the shell top bar.
- Button for Enabling/Disabling the feature, this will probably go
directly in the accessibility menu

I guess that integrating in the control center will require a rewrite
of most of the the UI and the shell integration will be a shell plugin
so the current wxWidget implementation won't really be a problem.

Then we will need a separated service (probably dbus controlled) based
on the existing code which does the actual tracking and move the
mouse.

So the questions now are : Is it easily possible to separate the
existing program in those parts? And is someone willing to step up and
do the work?

On Mon, Oct 24, 2011 at 10:49 PM, Cesar Mauri <cesar crea-si com> wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
>>> The application provides that UI (here [1][2] for some screenshots) in
>>> order to:
>>>   * Configure the application (on the screenshot the Configuration dialog)
>>
>> I am not a designer but I would somehow wonder if they would consider
>> this a good user-interface design.
>
> Those screenshots are quite outdated and the current version also includes a configuration wizard. See the eViacam's help files (included in the source tarball) for updated versions.
>
>>>   * A main window showing the input of the webcam, in order to get some
>>> feedback (ie: if the head region was properly set)
>>
>> Does this use gstreamer? In general, is the application using gstreamer
>> as de-facto standard for webcams in Linux/GNOME?
>
> No, eViacam does not use gstreamer. It uses its own capture layer on top of v4l2 because needs access to the settings of the camera (i.e. to allow to set exposure time and other parameters).
>
> Regards,
> César
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--
Olivier Lê Thanh Duong <olivier lethanh be>

Phone : +32487892093 Jabber: olethanh gmail com