Building Spiritual Worlds

General Discussion
1

Hi,

My subject line refers to the project course at CMU Building Virtual Worlds.
I am not much into games, I learned programming in the late 70’s when I was
a teenager and there were few video games at the time.

I would be more interested in building a simulation of a spiritual world
that I experienced some fifteen years ago. ATM, I think of it as a memorial
to a couple of old monks that I met then and died a couple of years ago.
The name for the simulation, for now, is The Blind Monk Universe. The blind
monk (IRL) was interviewed in the movie Into Great Silence about a director who
waited close to a couple of decades (IIRC) for the permission to film the
life of the monks at la Grande Chartreuse in France.

I have been “playing” for the past month with Panda3d and I saw a reference
to a chat directory in the file PACAKGE-DESC. It seems an old description
of the content of the dir panda/src in the SDK. I would like to know where I can
find the content of that directory since I would be interested in providing
such a facility.

Also, but this time, it is more of a curiosity: why was the namespace for the
Python interface to the framework called direct?

Thank you for your time,
brd

2 Likes
2

That’s all I know about DIRECT.

However, it has a source, I do not know if it is an authentic document.

3

Thanks, on page 50 of the document, we can read
Disney’s Interactive Real-time Environment Construction Tools (direct).

There is also an IEEE article which references
panda as Platform-Agnostic Networked Display
Architecture.
(The Panda3d Graphics Engine, Goslin, Mine)

4

I reinstalled cvs and I managed to retrieve a copy of the chat dir from the Attic on the cvs server on sourceforge.

5

However, the early license for Panda3D had limitations, please pay attention to this point if you use this code.

6

Thank you for the reminder.

7

Got to admire the closing statement and image.

“The true challenge in VR research!” - Virtual Disney Worlds Mark Mine

Marks 24 years of advancements from that pdf and we have “wireless” VR headsets.

Yet quantum computers able to almost real-time give Electron Orbital paths were a sci-fiction postulation.

Hope we meet the singularity before we meet the atomic bomb again as a race and really get to see where technology and biology thrive too.

8

I am an optimist. Your comment made me go over the Disney presentation once more.
And I noticed the design challenge of creating a flying carpet for Aladdin’s attraction.
ATM, I am facing a similar situation: how to represent, in Panda3d, a private oratory
for a blind monk. To me, it is an interesting question that this new technology invites
us to ponder.