DIMPLE: Dynamically Interactive Musically PhysicaL Environment

This project is an implementation of a physical dynamics environment which can be controlled via OSC, so that audio projects such as PureData can create physical objects in a virtual space, and then let them interact with each other, colliding and otherwise moving around. Data about objects' position and acceleration, for example, can be retrieved and then used to affect some sort of audio synthesis. It is a part of the "force feedback for audio systems" IDMIL project and was first presented at NIME 2007.

The environment can also be used for interacting with a hand controller haptic device.

This is all accomplished via many GPL (or similar) libraries, such as:

CHAI 3D, for haptics
ODE, for physical dynamics
LibLo, for OSC messaging
GLUT & FreeGLUT, for graphics (optional)

It is cross-platform, running on Linux, OS X, and Windows. Unfortunately, most haptic devices only provide drivers for Windows, though CHAI 3D does support the SensAble Phantom family of devices under Linux if you have the driver.

A beta version of this software is available here:

dimple-0.0.8-1.tar.gz (source)
dimple-0.0.8-win32.zip (Windows binary)
dimple-0.0.8-osx.dmg (Mac OS X binary)

There is currently no .deb or .rpm, but Linux users may compile the software from source. Please run “bootstrap.sh” before proceeding with “make”.

Snapshots of older versions are also available.

Documentation of DIMPLE's messages is available.

Requirements

To run the included test patch, test.pd, you'll need PureData. You need at least 0.40.1, with the extended build since it requires sendOSC and dumpOSC, and a few other objects. Remember to run dimple.exe before clicking the “Initialize” bang.

Mailing list

A mailing list for discussing both using and developing DIMPLE can be subscribed to here:

http://music.mcgill.ca/mailman/listinfo/dimple

Development

If you'd like to track the development version, or even contribute patches, please feel free to clone the git tree with the following command:

git clone http://idmil.org/git/dimple.git

This works fine with msysGit on Windows (with g++ installed) as well as on Linux and OS X. Please run the bootstrap.sh script before compiling, which takes care of downloading and compiling dependencies on the respective platform.

To get an overview of the current development branches, the commit logs are available for browsing.