The inspiration for this post has come from a variety of sources. (Feel free to skip this preamble where I talk about the history of the project: as much as anything it’s so I remember myself how things happened when I come back to this post at some point in the future. 😉
My colleague, Simon Breslav, worked on an initial implementation in Dasher 360 that animated robots – and even mapped stress information to their surfaces – for a demo shown at AU 2017, back when I was travelling around the world with my family. One of the issues Simon had with his implementation was the amount of per-model configuration required: the mechanism was linked to specific components that somehow had to be identified in the model (for the demo this was hardcoded).
Simon’s work was partly driven by a collaboration with the AMF in the UK, where we knew we’d one day want to display animated robots inside Dasher 360.
More recently I started working on displaying human skeletons inside the Forge…