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White RABBITReadily Available Benevolent Bot Inside your Terminal |
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White Rabbit:
First and foremost, the main purpose of White Rabbit is to be a
general-purpose 3D avatar for UNIX (mostly Linux but most likely FreeBSD, and possibly MacOS X).
It will closely resemble the interface and design of of Microsoft Agent, except for the fact
that it won't suck. And it will follow the UNIX philosophy of modularity and will let the
user add plug-ins to make the agent aware of the state of the system (e.g. if the user has email,
tell the user). Communication will be through a dialog box, speech, and (thanks to those
lovely plug-ins I just mentioned) anything from AOL Instant Messenger to a remote control car
powered by an infrared unit attached to a computer. The skeletal structure will be handled
with the cal3d library. I'm guessing that the
speech system will be festival but I
plan on making that abstracted so that other systems can be used. To aide in the
development and use of White Rabbit, there will be a few subprojects listed below.
Agent Creator:
This is the theme creation program. It should be able to load models
in different formats handled the way
Imlib2 handles its formats (drop an object file in a certain directory and fam tells it to
load any new formats). As of now, I plan on making the default format the
the open 3d format. This program will
be written with the intent of making it super-easy for a graphic designer with very little
background in 3D modelling to be able to sit down and play with a theme and release it to the
public within a small amount of time.
The default themes will probably include a gecko (I love that GEICO commercial with the gecko on the podium giving a press conference), a Linux penguin, a BSD daemon, and anything else that I can find. The theme author will also have the option of editing the dialog boxes that go with the theme. These files will be seperate but could always be packaged together. I'm still thinking about how I'm going to handle the kinematics of the personality of the characters (e.g. if its a black guy with an afro, it should walk like a black guy with a fro). But I'll still be focusing on making that as easy to do as possible. Supportable file formats:
Usefulness:
That's great and all that there's a little person walking around the screen
but if it doesn't help the user, it doesn't help. I'm looking into using
Narval for that.
An example of how I would like it to interact with the user would be if these was an intrusion detection system installed on some machine, the avatar would switch to something else (e.g. a war mech, civil war soldier, etc) and would notify the user and ask for some instructions as to how to deal with the problem. I also have the vision of making it a part of the help system somehow. Putting a face to the machine might put some people at ease. |
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