What is this?
This page is about what we’re working on and planning. This can change at any time without warning.
As well, there are no ETAs for anything, we release stuff when it’s ready.
This is actually a MASSIVE change even if you’ll probably never notice it.
Amethyst is currently written in C++. And while it’s crazy stable and fast, development has become a chore. As such Akaya is rewriting it and the plugins in C#.NET for easier development.
Work on this is going along pretty well. But it is stopping further development on other features.
We released a rather janky plugin for using Amethyst for VRChat’s OSC trackers feature. Because it’s a plugin, there are a ton of limitations in tracking quality and features.
Once Amethyst.NET is ready, native OSC support will be implemented. And should be hopefully available by the next release.
This isn’t quite development-related but the current state of Amethyst is in a soft-release. We want to come out with a bang once everything is ready after Native OSC. We’re talking release trailer, social media announcements, finally taking off the “Preview” tag.
Getting out of beta and releasing on time as one might say.
The stuff here is in the planning and “can we even do this? is this worth it?” stages.
These are only plans
None of these are guaranteed to be arriving to Amethyst.
99% of the Kinect’s limitations are due to it using a proprietary skeleton tracking SDK created by Microsoft Research in the mid-2000s.
They were using what was considered state-of-the-art in machine learning at the time, but even then also had to make sure it ran on 10% of an Xbox 360! so they made a ton of concessions. Limited the training dataset to poses they deemed useful for Xbox games, and imposed hardcoded limitations like the Kinect always facing forward.
We wish to take the Kinect’s depth map, and create our own pose estimation neural network with the help of the community to gather a large dataset. This is very still in the planning stages, but we’re really hopeful we can pull it off.
This one is a maybe. With Amethyst.NET, the UI and the logic are being decoupled. Meaning that in theory, Amethyst could run as a .NET Core app on Linux, with it’s UI in UNO Platform.
The Kinect plugin would not have skeleton tracking (Unless we’ve got AI tracking working by then), PSMove couldn’t work (PSMSEX is Windows only), so, you’d be left with owoTrack, and maybe an OpenHMD plugin to use a Rift as trackers.
The technical aspect is very feasible, but it’s moreso we’re wondering if it’s worth it at all.