I don’t have anything physical to contribute, but I’d sure like to convince you that you need a physics engine in the user interface, so I made a prototype to show you. When will you be at the ‘lab so I can demo? j.

hi the UI is done. it just needs some minor CSS fixes. leo is working on this that week.

Can I ask - how does the UI send off a cmd to the onboard controller to load up the item? Should I even ask this question (i.e. do you want it shared?)?

also the tablet i used is a very very cheapo one and will manage to run the JS interface somehow .. but there is no beefy GPU or CPU in there .. so i wonder if your engine would work on that platform.

It probably will, you never know until you try. ;) Maybe I can demo to Leo some time, in case there’s interest?

anyway.. as i am expecting my second child to spawn in the next hours/days i am probably not going to be around any time soon.

What?!! YAY! Exciting! New humans rock! j.

Can I ask - how does the UI send off a cmd to the onboard controller to load up the item? Should I even ask this question (i.e. do you want it shared?)? I think I can spill the beans on that secret technology — there's a computer-human-computer interface involved, where a child is placed in the machine and instructed to read an identifier from the tablet screen and enter it into the number pad visible on the outside of the device. If we can't get a small child (chinese or otherwise) for the machine, overflo is even considering asking the machine's customer to do that part.

LOL. So no i2C to the backend, then, unless it means “I Tu the Child what to Do..”

...

also the tablet i used is a very very cheapo one and will manage to run the JS interface somehow .. but there is no beefy GPU or CPU in there .. so i wonder if your engine would work on that platform.

It probably will, you never know until you try. ;) Maybe I can demo to Leo some time, in case there’s interest? The tablet is already unbearingly slow as it is. I wonder whether there's some way to optimize it (for example, by offloading stuff to the GPU by using 3D transforms).

Well, my proposed UI uses MOAI, which as you know is a 3D engine pushing stuff off to the GPU as a matter of course. Anyway, sorry for butting in on the project, I don’t mean to be rude and say the existing web-based stuff isn’t great - because, clearly, it is, and the whole project itself is probably the coolest thing I’ve seen at Metalab in a long time (coz it gives hackers a way to make $ from their projects, duh). I’d be very honoured to be given the chance to demo the UI and see if it will work. Of course, I respect the hard work that you guys have put into it, but when I saw the whole thing being constructed, I had the thought “you know what this thing needs? Physics.” so I put a few lines together and .. well I think it’d be cool to add Physics-Bling to the thing, know what I mean? j.