Octopus FrameWork for POSTWIMP Interfaces

Octopus is a (2d) FrameWork for experimenting with POSTWIMP userinterfaces. Octopus uses the OpenGL library to display 2d graphics on the screen. The use of OpenGL fascilitates experimenting with transparent tools such as ToolGlasses. A special driver allows more than one mouse attached to the machine to be handled seperately to enable experimentation with two-handed interaction techniques. Octopus includes an implementation of Rubines gesture recognition algorithm to enable experimentation with gesture-based interaction techniques.

A simple document-based interface to parsing and creating XML files are included.

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Requirements for Using Octopus

The Octopus FrameWork is currently only supported on the Microsoft Windows (NT/2000/XP) platform. Work are in progress to port the FrameWork to Linux and MacOS X.

To use the Octopus FrameWork, the following pieces of software are required:

Microsoft Visual Studio 6 or 7 (.Net) : The development environment from Microsoft that includes a Linker and standard libraries necessary to build applications. This software may be purchased from Microsoft.
Mjølner BETA System: The BETA compiler and standard BETA libraries necessary to build BETA applications. This software are available for free download from the Mjølner BETA website.

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The Octopus framework consists of these separate parts:

opengl: Procedural BETA interface to the OpenGL library.
xml: Simple interface to parsing and creating XML files, based on the ExPat XML parser.
postwimp: The Octopus FrameWork.
driver: Special driver that enables Octopus applications to handle multible input devices.

The source files for these libraries are contained in three directories opengl, xml, and octopus that must be placed at the top-level of the directory-tree for the Mjølner BETA System (typically called "beta").

Along with the libraries, Octopus contains a special mousedriver. The driver enables the framework to handle input from each mouse attached to the computer as seperate input devices.

The driver does not affect how the mouse devices are handled by other applications running in Windows. The driver is not a replacement for the normal mousedrivers - it acts as a filter that calls back to the normal driver when an Octopus application is not active.

The driver is written in the C language and is usable by applications written in any language with C bindings.

Mouse Driver

To obtain and install the special mouse driver:

Download mouse-driver (zipped archive)
Unpack the zipped archive
Read how to install the mouse driver

FrameWork

There are three different options for downloading the FrameWork:

1) Download opengl, xml, postwimp seperately:

opengl (zipped archive - sources only)
xml (zipped archive - sources only)
postwimp (zipped archive - sources only)

- or -

2) Download all three libraries in one archive:

octopus (zipped archive - sources only)