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Home ? Feedback ? Could app control be exposed for automation?

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13/05/2010 22:22:02

adrians
adrians
Posts: 3 		Hi,

It would be great if Muvizu would expose an API for allowing external programs to automate some features. An alternative would be to make Muvizu scriptable - look at at how Ruby is used in Sketchup, for example. One of the possibilities I'm thinking of is to allow for voice control over some of the functions that can be done in Muvizu. Imagine directing characters or objects by voice. Windows comes with built-in support for voice recognition, so it would be quite straightforward for knowledgeable users (I could do this if automation were available) to create utilities that could take voice commands as input and call the exposed API to do various things.

Essentially voice control would be similar to operating the app using hotkeys, but it would be quite a bit more flexible because a whole series of actions could be mapped to a relatively short set of voice commands. Of course, if all actions were automatable all kinds of external controls could be used, not just voice. Programmatic control of crowds could be achieved, objects could be positioned, sized and animated according to preset patterns, and these presets could be triggered by voice, hotkeys, touch surface, or any other means desired.

Here are some possible voice commands I envision using a relatively easy to parse directing language:

James, walk to the "front door". - front door would be a name assigned to an object
James, look at the "ceiling fan".
Barry, nod your head.
Jane, jump right.
Bookshelf, change color to blue.
Switch to camera 3.

Quite a few useful actions could be controlled in this way because the directing language could be purposely limited to avoid ambiguity. By using hotkeys and other scripts running in parallel to the voice control, very intricate direction could be achieved.

In any case, exposing functionality in the way I mentioned is the way to start - I'm sure that wonderful things could come out of it.

Cheers
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02/08/2010 02:28:29

adrians
adrians
Posts: 3 		Hi again,

I was thinking that this section of the forum was no longer monitored, but now that I look, I can see that most recent posts have been answered. Could someone from Muvizu please comment on this suggestion either in the negative or affirmative? I suppose I should take the silence in regards to this suggestion to mean that there's nothing planned in this area, but I remain hopeful.

Thanks,
Adrian
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02/08/2010 11:25:42

glasgowjim
glasgowjim
Posts: 698 		Hi Adrian,

Sorry for the late reply - I thought I got all of the unanswered suggestions, but I must have missed yours.

I have spoken to the Devs about adding automation - there are currently no plans to make Muvizu scriptable or add the ability to use external controls but it may be looked at again at a later date.

Thanks for your feeback and if you have any other suggestions we would love to hear them.
-Jim.
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02/08/2010 14:13:59

JamieMuvizu staff
Jamie
(Account inactive)
Posts: 609 		Hello,

I've had a little play about with voice controls and I had some luck - that being that the voice control worked in so far as something happened when key words were said. It is pretty unreliable though but that may be down to training the microsoft speech recognition system more to my voice and writting a better script. The other limitation is that I've only looked into using existing hot keys in Muvizu (ctrl+space to start recording, space to stop recording or beging playback if your not recording).

What I did was to install the Speech recognition engine in microsoft office and then use glovepie to emulate keyboard input based on keywords. You can get glovepie at http://glovepie.org/ - you'd probably have to spend a serious amount of time writting a script that would work with the various conditions.

If anyone is interested I can post my initial draft script (seriously i spent about 15 mins on it so its not really up to much...).

Hope this helps,
Jamie

--
Direct, don't animate!
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