verber@pacific.mps.ohio-state.edu (Mark A. Verber) (10/05/89)
For just sounds MIDI has been the typical route. I expect the Media Lab might have some interesting projects going on at this time, but I haven't been there recently (hello MIT?). One project that was done originally at the Media Lab and is now a commercial product is called HookUp. HookUp allowed a user to link i/o operations together by streams to produce interesting animation, sounds or whatever. HookUp was originally used to run the radio controlled blimp which was simulating a rudimentory fish brain. The author, David Levitt, is now selling a version of HookUp for the Mac. He will later do an IBM-PC and Unix port of the project. David also working on a music theory level representation for sound. THis is written in lisp and runs on Macs. This too will be ported to IBM-PC and Unix machines. Bothe products will be sold by Hip Software. There phone is (617) 661-2447. There is one other animation toolkit that should be hitting that market soon for the Mac. It is based on the wire frame modeling tool Trix which was done at the Ohio State Universty, Computer Graphics Researcher Group (CGRG). A commercial version will allow interactive wire frame modeling, but has hooks to output through RenderMan for a final output. There have been a number of animation packages that various people have done and presented at SigGraph. Most of those will never see the light of day. Either the project is from a group that sells the resulting annimation (they don't want people to have a tool as good as their own) or the work has come from a school and is pure research. I am sure there are some research groups which might release the work they have done. -- Mark A. Verber System Programmer, Physics Department, Ohio State University verber@pacific.mps.ohio-state.edu (614) 292-8002