1 Nov 2011 cananian   » (Master)

A collection of Nell demos

Here are some banged-together demos of various pieces of One Laptop per Child's Project Nell. The ultimate goal is a Nell demo for CES in January 2012, but these bits should be considered as tech demos, benchmarks, and proofs of concept, not actual pieces of that demo (yet).

Most of these demos require WebGL support. Visit get.webgl.org for information about enabling WebGL in your browser; there is WebGL support in Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Opera—although it often requires enabling experimental features in the browser preferences.

  • Tiles. Performance benchmark for a tile-based home screen. "Apps" are "locations" on your world map, which you can customize as you like. (Here's an interesting blog entry discussing world-creation for kids.) Day/night would ultimately reflect current time, although they've been greatly sped up in this demo. Lots of rough edges and missing UI, but all the textured triangles are present, so it should be an accurate benchmark.
    (Drag with left mouse button to rotate, middle mouse button to zoom, right mouse button to pan.)
  • Nell at home. Basic idea (including transition) for activities which include dialog with Nell or story-telling.
    Standalone model viewers: Castle (from blendswap), "Nell" (Sintel, from blendswap), Alternate (lightweight) Nell model, Alternate (heavyweight) house model (from blendswap).
    In model viewers: drag with left mouse button to rotate, middle mouse button to zoom, right mouse button to pan.
  • Music maker. Uses WebGL and the Web Audio APIs to let you draw and perform music.
    Inspired by André Michelle's ToneMatrix and Karplus-Strong Guitar (see also wiki and this 2008 Linux Audio Conference paper), as well as DinahMoe's ToneCraft and the Tenori-on.
  • Quake on XO-1.75 (video). Of course we need to actually run WebGL with good performance on XO hardware. Jon Nettleton has been working hard on our GL drivers, enabling the GPU on the XO-1.75 hardware for the first time. This Quake demo shows his progress—don't worry, Quake is not actually part of the Nell demo! (We have a GPU in the XO-1.5 as well, which hasn't yet been utilized.)
  • Codify—not one of our demos (it's a commercial iPad app) but it demonstrates the direction we'd like to push Pippy.

Coming soon: TurtleArt and Implode for the web. We've started converting them to GTK3 in preparation for hoisting them bodily onto the interwebs. Here's the source code repository for the TurtleArt port if you'd like to watch or participate in this hackage. (See repl.it for one of the more unusual ways to get Python running in the web context.) The rest of the demo source code is on github (or just "View Source" in your browser).

Syndicated 2011-11-01 22:28:14 from Dr. C. Scott Ananian

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