Attempt of UC Davis program on the Mac OS X

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Although Mac OS X is not recommended by UC Davis for their sandbox program, I tried it this week.

Driver



NVIDIA GeForce driver is the base to realize the display of flowing water on the sandbox. It is compulsory to realize the raining function. The default graphic driver (GPU) of lab Mac is NVIDIA GeForce 9400. It seems to be possible to install required programs and toolkits of the UC Davis Sandbox.

However, when checking the server and client vendor, they are not from the NVIDIA corporation. To solve it, the NVIDIA driver should be reinstalled. Nevertheless, there is no available version of NVIDIA GeForce for Mac OS X 10.6.3 (Figure 1), which is the operating system of the lab Mac.


Figure 1: NVIDIA Driver Downloads

As a result, although the current driver in Mac could support the program, its installation does not conform to the objective state and the version is outdated. There might be possibility to try if the old version could work, so further steps were tried.


Vrui VR Toolkit

This toolkit is to support a VR environment and realize the interaction between virtual display and users. In the sandbox project, it is used to sense the operation of users and finally show the results on the screen. In details, when hands are under the Kinect camera, Vrui will help to process this operational instructions and trigger the raining function. Ideally, the rain as a form of flowing water, supported by NVIDIA GeForce, will be displayed in the sand screen.

There is only complete installation instructions for Linux System. Based on the limited instructions for Mac, firstly source files were downloaded and they were successfully found in the Terminal window.

Vrui works with KeckCAVES. In Mac, KeckCAVES can only be installed with the help of XQuartz and Homebrew. However, when downloading Homebrew, it was incompatible to the Mac OS X 10.6.3, where the installing commands cannot be recognized by the system. Moreover, when using Terminal to find the download paths of Vrui and KeckCAVES, the link paths also cannot be found and the command was invalid.

Figure 2: Installing Vrui

Figure 3: Requirements to install Homebrew

One reason is the unavailability of downloading path, which is not updated I suppose, while another reason is also the version of Mac OS X. The recommended version should be Mac OS X 10.11 or higher, as shown in Figure 3.


Summary

The hardware configuration of UC Davis sandbox is high. The current computers in the lab cannot support it. Additionally, not as a recommended OS, Mac OS X must be in the sufficiently updated version, otherwise unexpected mistakes will be encountered. Old versions are not compatible to software requirements of this program.

The solution might be giving up this coding source and continue to work on the current available one. Next week I will focus on adding the raining function in the current codes.




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