Multi-touch and Chimera
Hello all, I am a graduate student at the University of Applied Sciences in Switzerland and in my diploma work, I would like to develop a multi-touch user interface for Chimera. By multi-touch I mean the capability of interpreting simultaneous user interactions. You can find more info on the technology here: http://cs.nyu.edu/~jhan/ftirtouch/ <http://cs.nyu.edu/%7Ejhan/ftirtouch/> I already have a working hardware, now I have to find the software to work on. Of course the time and resource limitations of this diploma work wouldn't allow to interface all the functions of Chimera for multi-touch, so I'd be aiming to choose a couple of them, those that are used mainly by the users of Chimera that I know. So basically my aim would be to take for example the Select-chain menu, the Actions-color menu and the Tools-Structure Analysis-Distances tool and make it available to touch interaction. And of course the user would be able to move around the molecule with one finger along the X and Y axis, he would be able to turn it around using 3 fingers simultaneously (2 defining the axis and the third making the rotation) and zoom in and out using 2 fingers simultaneously. So my question is, would it be possible to have the source code that would let me do this development? Thanks a lot for taking the time to read my inquiry. Regards, Greg (Gergely Nagy)
Hi Greg, Sounds neat. Will a multi-touch interface work with a standard laptop touch-pad? The source code for Chimera is on the web though it isn't up to date. http://www.cgl.ucsf.edu/chimera/sourcecode.html All of the functions you are interested in are implemented in Python code which is included in the distributed Chimera. The Python code is in files (with ".py" suffix) in directories under chimera/share or on Mac under directory Chimera.app/Contents/Resources/share. But it is quite difficult to find the Chimera Python routines you need. Our programming reference guide (automatically generated from code comments) is not too useful but we provide programming examples that might help. http://www.cgl.ucsf.edu/chimera/docs/ProgrammersGuide/Examples/index.html The easiest approach is to ask us by email for the routines you need, e.g. list all chain identifiers, select chain given id, color equivalent to actions menu, move models, rotate models, show atom-atom distance, find atom under mouse, draw label.... Eric Pettersen is the most familiar with that code and what simple routines already exist to do those things. He is on vacation now but expected back around Thursday. You are interested in atom-atom distances. Will the user choose an atom through the touch interface? It seems that would require visual feedback in the Chimera window -- equivalent of the mouse pointer. I suppose you could take over the mouse pointer, or you could create a new "cursor" implemented perhaps as a Chimera 2d label. Tom
participants (2)
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Gergely Nagy -
Tom Goddard