PROCESSING MOUSE COORDINATES SOFTWARE

The diffuser needs to be removed for cleaning just about every session so design with that in mind. On this sits a box (just 4 sides) made from mirrored acrylic, and on top of that two sheets of frosted glass as a diffuser (a few mm between the two sheets make the diffuser much more efficient). I made this from ~12 red 700mA LEDs glued to a thin (~2mm) aluminum plate that is bolted to the air table, which then acts as a huge heatsink.

I use a high frame rate (~330Hz), low (650nm), because it’s fairly invisible to mice.

All automatic adjustments in the camera are disabled, and all focus/aperture rings screwed in tight. This means that one set of hand-tuned parameters work for all sessions.

The platforms and camera are bolted down so they can’t move by even a mm, even when bumped.

Here, the setup was designed with the following things in mind: Often, small easy changes can make an otherwise hard image processing step very easy. By far the most important thing to get right with this kind of tracking is the physical setup. To make this a bit more interesting, a fiber optic cable obscures parts of the image sometimes, and the mouse will sometimes assume odd poses and not just stick its head across the gap. The ‘target’ platform (on the right) is mostly static but occasionally retracts by a few mm very quickly (same method as in our anticipatory whisking paper). The two platforms between which the mouse moves can be moved: The ‘base’ platform (left) has a variable position and is re-positioned by hand (slowly) between trials. This extended capability is now available as well.The setup consists of a camera that gets a top-down view of a mouse crossing from one side of the frame to the other and back.

But sometimes, individual operators still want the ability to choose between different layouts in the locked mode, for example to switch between night and day shifts. OpSpace already supported this option, next to the normal dynamic layout mode. This is mostly done for security reasons. In some environments, there is a static and locked layout for the operator, which means that the layout cannot be manually changed. At the same time, the exclusive control feature is expanded to all interactive sources – including RDP. An operator in control of a source can now grant viewing access to the private source to ease collaboration and situational awareness in the control room. This expands the existing Private mode – which allowed operators to view exclusive sources, like private e-mail – with a sharing option. The new Observer mode puts access granularity and workflow abilities to the next level. This does not change the normal behavior, but enables to migrate legacy systems or integrate 3rd party hardware.

PROCESSING MOUSE COORDINATES SOFTWARE

The new software release extends OpSpace with an option for dedicated sources using relative mouse coordinates. Customers with legacy sources using a PS/2 mouse, or with proprietary hardware or software that use a relative pointer system, could not integrate these sources into OpSpace in a convenient way. While this has little effect for users, it does make a lot of difference for the computer systems. Unlike a modern USB-mouse, the legacy PS/2 mouse generation used relative pointer coordinates to navigate on a pixel space.

Operators can now dynamically connect to sources on Hyper-V, opening a world of new opportunities. Also control room projects are starting to rely on Hyper-V, so we enabled the OpSpace RDP+ to communicated with Hyper-V. Companies are increasingly relying on it for virtualization and on-demand provisioning. Hyper-V, Microsoft’s hypervisor solution for servers, which creates virtual machines, is continuously growing in importance. The recently released version 1.9.5 again features some very interesting updates. And as the needs of the operator evolve, so does OpSpace! Regular updates make sure the software always answers to the latest requirements. Barco’s OpSpace is an operator workspace that is tailored to the operator.

Processing mouse coordinates