[Verse-dev] Virtual workspace using Verse

[Emil Brink]

On 12/18/07, Kiran <krec.kiran at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi ,
>              I plan to develop a minimal virtual workspace using verse,
> which assists in colloboration,

Cool! Please beware though, this is quite a far-reaching goal. It's
more than we did during the Uni-Verse research project, but on the
other hand we never had that application as a goal so the comparison
is not very fair. :)

>               This may involve a whiteboard,a room with four walls and
> sharing  of documents like pdf,words.

Cool. The basic room geometry would need to be modelled and stored on
a server. A practical way to do this is of course to model it and save
the model as a VML file. You can then start a dedicated server to host
the environment, and upload the model to it.

The whiteboard is easily implemented by texturing a wall with a bitmap
(of sufficient resolution) and then using GIMP to open that bitmap.
This can be done by multiple clients in parallel, and the bitmap will
be shared. There is no other dedicated bitmap editing tool that is
Verse-aware, as far as I know (but I have little idea about the exact
status of Blender, currently).

Sharing of files is less straight-forward, there is no 100% ready
solution there. You might be able to cook something up by patching a
FTP server so it creates Verse representations of files uploaded in a
dedicated area, or something. Now that I think of it, that sounds
pretty nice and also like something we should have done (in my
opinion) during the project.

>              I am stuck on how to go about and developing the same using Verse.

Completely understandable, Verse is complex and abstract.

>              Do I have to write a OpenGL application which does the graphical
> building blocks and then enable it by calling Verse API or do i have to se writing
> VML to define geometrical objects needed for this?

Probably a bit of both, as outlined above. Rendering should be left to
Quel Solaar though, you don't want to write a custom renderer or you
will be busy a very long time. :)

> Also do you have a complete working example of some demo application from
> which we can learn.

Nathan kindly provided a link to the Subversion repository, I hope you
can learn from there.

Regards,

/Emil