TRACER
Toolset for Realtime Animation, Collaboration & Extended Reality
TRACER is a framework for realizing XR applications. It features:
‣ An open transfer protocol to provide 3D scenes coming from any DCC, game engine or XR application
‣ Time-synchronized scene updates for real-time collaboration and multi-user applications
‣ Generalized parameter representation and synchronization
‣ Network communication through netMQ/zeroMQ
‣ AR support (incl. Tracking and Markers)
‣ Touch UI (Buttons and Navigation Gestures)
‣ Synchronisation Server
‣ Modular, extendible, module-based architecture
And much more...
VPET – the Virtual Production Editing Tools - are a development from previous research projects. Lately an effort was realized to make the fundamental functionalities available for more general XR applications. Through a re-factoring and reimplementation, functionalities and Implementations of VPET have been transferred into a modern, modular and extendible framework called TRACER. VPET 2.0 now serves as a sample implementation in the TRACER framework.
The TRACER framework itself is developed in C#, thereby it becomes easy to target any Desktop, VR or XR platform. TRACER can be integrated and interact with any GameEngine (e.g. Unreal) or DCC (e.g. Blender, Maya, ...) throuth the provided open APIs and protocols. TRACER is fully open-source and can be obtained from our GitHub repository that also includes VPET.
Within the MAX-R Project extensions to the TRACER framework will be realized: AnimHost and DataHub.
AnimHost will connect animation generators to open source DCC applications, on-set tools like VPET or renderers in general. It will be functionally independent of the animation receiving app and provide an intuitive interface to support new solvers (including AI approaches), with a focus on real-time scenarios. It will be possible to generate animations automatically and permit interactive directing by non-professionals and experts alike. The development will be engine agnostic, allow high level interaction with a character in real-time, and be adaptable to any future DCC application.
DataHub will serve as a software agnostic communication infrastructure and toolset for plugging open-source tools into the pipeline of Virtual Productions and XR Productions in general, establishing interoperability between open source and proprietary tools, targeting real-time.