Sebastien’s Status Report for 3/6/2021

This week I mostly spent time reading about how Linux and Mac handle virtual devices and mentally cataloguing OpenCV’s very large set of rather useful API’s. A lot of this was because we needed to make a precise decision about what we were doing and to some extent there wasn’t much of a consensus at first, so we all spent some time doing some more reading and learning about each of the possibilities and how much time they would take. In particular, I was looking into Professor Kim’s suggestion of being able to draw straight onto the screen and then pipe the result into zoom (or wherever in theory), which means a virtual camera interface. On linux, there’s actually a kernel module, a part of the Video 4 Linux project, that creates loopback devices, which are more or less a file that a program can write frame data to that has a corresponding file from which said data can be read by other programs. Mac has a dedicated library that has far less documentation and it seems far less simple to implement, so we decided to stick to Linux as our targeted platform and write the entire thing in C++. I also created an updated software architecture diagram for the system, which as of now will be a pipeline consisting of 4 threads that use message passing channels from the boost library for synchronization.