#Director
Hi! You and I must be the only ones left, since I've gotten NO other
responses to my inquiry either on CIS or on the internet's Amiga multi- media
forums.
My current project is an interactive artwork, authored with the Director.
There's a motion detector, hooked up to the joystick port, which detects a
viewer in the exhibition space. When detected, a human figure appears on
screen (DCTV images) and digitized speech invites the viewer over to "scratch"
the back of the figure. When the viewer touches the mouse, the onscreen figure
turns over, a pointer comes on, and, as long as the viewer scratches, the work
unfolds a "story" of digitized speech. There are several such "stories" in the
work selected at random when the story is loaded.
The Director's mouse-handling capabilities allow me to tell whether a viewer
is moving the mouse or not, and the joystick commands allow me to poll the
motion detector when I need to to ascertain whether there's a viewer in the
room or not. It works great.
I ran into two significant problems though, one of which I've resolved the
other of which is so baffling, I can't figure it out. The one I resolved had
to do with the program's going off into some never-land when the viewer clicked
the mouse buttons. It turned out this ONLY happened with DCTV images. If I
ran EXACTLY the same program, but substituted HAM images, this problem didn't
appear. Weird. My solution was to buy a used mouse, cut the wires to the
buttons, and use that with the program. It moves the pointer around just fine
and viewers can click away all they want without sending the program haywire.
It might not be elegant, but it works. The guy who sold me the mouse wondered
why anyone would want a mouse with a broken left button, but for me it was just
perfect.
Gotta run. I'll tell you about the other problem when I can get back to my
machine. Maybe you have an idea for a solution. Have fun! George Roland