Michelle Head, editor of LinuxNews, interviewed some folks at the Jim Henson Creature Shop about their use of Linux in the Henson Performance Control System (HPCS) that they are developing. It seems the Creature Shop is funding the development of some interesting GUI and real-time Linux technologies which will, of course, end up being contributed back to the open source software pool. Head writes . . .

“The HPCS (see photo) was designed with the characters' performances in mind. 'We've created a graphical user interface (GUI), based on GTK [the GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP) tool kit], which gives the puppeteers' high level performance tools,' he explained. 'These allow them to throw expressions together very efficiently and make available certain Henson performance algorithms that our Henson puppeteers are used to' . . .”

“The system uses graphics programs familiar to open source artists. The system uses a 3D graphics viewer based on the OpenGL standard created by Silicon Graphics, Inc. (SGI) At the moment, we're in a relationship with [SGI subsidiary] Alias Wavefront's Maya division, and we're using the Maya SDK [software development kit],' he said. 'We are currently porting it to Linux. It's basically a gaming engine that the Maya people created to compete with the likes of 3d studio max' . . . Rosenbluth added that the Maya engine for Linux will be donated back to Alias when completed, and publicly available to Linuxphiles through them”

” . . . 'We're developing real-time Linux (RTLinux) with FSMLabs . . . [and] are paying for the further development of RTLinux because we need it to do special things for our puppeteering system — we're essentially paying for open source code and donating it back to the world' . . .”

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