This is a rough break down of the software I am currently looking into for the VR interface. I briefly broke it down so you could have a general idea of what everything does by itself.
Maverik-6.0:
Maverik is an API for developing real-time Virtual Reality applications under Windows or Linux systems. It accepts various forms of data files such VRML and AC3D makes a nice modeler for this type of thing. It runs only in a standalone environment hence requiring a network sub layer to connect to other systems. The folks over at Advanced Interfaces Group of the University of Manchester http://aig.cs.man.ac.uk are currently developing a parallel system for this called Deva but I have yet to preview any of their sources.
Looking forward it appears that the Verse API Toolkit would be best suited for the VRsec project at this time as the networking portion is trivial to set up to say the least. As far as distributed processing is concerned I believe it is not needed at this time but I am sure that it will be included in the future.
The basic configuration required for Maverik is an OpenGL or Mesa sub layer and a hardware based 3D Video Accelerator running either Linux or Win32's. It can be built directly with gcc, MS Visual C or a Cygwin dll for compiling in a Unix like state.
Verse is a client/server model for distributing shared Virtual Reality or 3D graphical environments over a network. Although the system is fairly new it has plenty of fine features to begin development with.
I am mainly using this API not for the "Enough" renderer but for the networking aspects of it. I will be using the Maverik Toolkit to perform the GUI rendering engine as well as the speech IO and device data input.
Net Saint is a CGI tool for maintaining networks via a web interface. It performs network scans as well as basic to advanced host inspections (CPU Time, Disk Activity, UpTimes, Loads etc). One of the nicest features of this interface is that it produces 3D VRML output of network maps from 2D data sets. This in turn can be used directly by Maverik for node creation as well as a sub-interface called VLL for uploading the data to the Verse 3D server for collaboration. VLL is part of the Verse Client SDK. This set of scripts is also good for performing basic system and network integrity checking using plug-ins and add-ons such as NMAP 2. All of this data can then be relayed to also most any data set for interpretation.
This site is maintained by Darxus. He has taken it upon himself to develop the Speechd daemon which will accept various forms of text and speak the text through /dev/speechd using Festival or Rsynth.
Thanks Darxus for all of the hard work you have put into this.
This will be the main layer for piping alarm triggers to alert the user to immediate system or environment changes. I thought this would be a good idea as the user would be "immersed" within the world and not always able to view independently each piece of data or event that were happening. My intent is to create a level based alarm script with which to prioritize this feature. A level 5 "ping" for example would not be mentioned but merely logged into a syslog server. Whereas a Level 1 "NMAP" scan would immediately alert the operator to a network intrusion operation while it is pending thereby allowing the operator to issue verbal commands to protect the network or allow the operator to interactively investigate it's nature or the behaviors of the attacker.
There are also other resources under the Speech IO directory for testing purposes. These are as follows:
Carnegie Mellon University Speech Recognition Software SPHINX:
A speech recognition program free for non-commercial use.
MBROLA is a speech synthesis engine for Linux x86 based architectures.
Festival is a Text-To-Speech system for MBROLA
A GNU Speech Synthesis/Recognition program
A Java API wrapper for incorporating IBM's Via Voice into a developer application. I more than likely will not be using this as I don't like the idea that I have to spend 80 bucks to preview something to see if it good enough for what I am doing. I am listing it here for anyone that has Via Voice and would like and API to integrate it into a program that they are working on.
A free GNU based software TTS synthesizer. I like this as it sounds really rough on the output like a robotic voice. I have not looked further into it yet but I will definitely be using it in some future songs that I am writing…
Drivers:
This directory contains source and binaries for both Windows and Linux operating systems.
The VIO Java driver will be ported to C eventually as for speed optimizations.
Also included is the 5DT Data glove driver for Win32 and Linux.