SandboxConcept

From Moviesandbox

the Sandbox concept is a project that tries to look beyond Moviesandbox and investigate the possibilities of a new set of tools for realtime animation production.

the general idea

The Sandbox Concept tries to use a 3D engine as its realtime renderer, or display. The virtual environment that is being displayed is created and modified using a number of independent modules, that communicate with the 3D engine by a standardised language such as COLLADA[1] or something yet to be created.

The individual Tools can consist of highly specialised programs such as PlayViz[2] or the Multi Track Input Recorder[3] from GeorgiaTech's TUI3D[4] group, the Panda Puppet project[5] or the VoxelEditor and some of the MSBTools that are already implemented.
By exchanging data with the 3D engine in realtime, you can work cooperatively and simultaneously in the same virtual environment.

a common language

In order to establish communication between the different modules and elevate the Sandbox Concept to a non-proprietary idea (not linked to a particular 3D engine), it is necessary to find a protocol that is capeable of dealing with all the different tasks and function of realtime filmmaking - be it modelling and lighting a scene, staging a character or defining a camera path.
A language like COLLADA seems to be a good starting point for this, especially for the animation, modelling and lighting modules.
The directing module however needs to provide a higher level language that is closer to common sense and film language than xml. It will be necessary to find a basic set of commands and grammar that can be used by filmmakers to direct virtual characters and link the appropriate resources from the other modules in a reasonable way.
Moviesandbox right now uses linked graphs as its grammar and a basic set of actions as its commands.