Real Time Distributed Objects for Interactive Multimedia
Aura is a real-time system for creating interactive multimedia. Aura is the primary real-time system platform developed and used by the Computer Music Project of the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University.
The real-time Aura project is one of many components of the larger CMU Aura project, investigating future applications in a world of pervasive computing. In that context, we are known as AuraRT to avoid confusion. But here, our original name, Aura, is used in place of AuraRT.
What is Aura?
The Aura approach to software design is the result of many years' experience building real-time interactive systems. Some principles we follow include:
The Aura philosophy has been applied to the design of a software architecture that includes a real-time object system, a real-time communication system, and facilities for real-time memory management.
The Aura Implementation
Aura has been implemented as a library. It can be viewed as "real-time middleware" that sits between an application (constructed from Aura objects) and the operating system. Aura's real-time performance is limited by the ability of the underlying operating system, e.g. if the operating system can schedule and run a thread every millisecond, then Aura provide as low as 1ms latency to the high priority thread. Aura is implemented in C++ and runs on Win32 systems, Irix, and Linux. Linux is now the preferred system because of its excellent support for real-time.
For publications, please see the Aura section of Roger Dannenberg's bibliography pages.
Aura has been used in a number of music and multimedia applications, most notably "Gray Matters: The Brain Movie", a state-of-the-art real-time audience-interactive educational show about the human brain.
Roger Dannenberg's collaboration with Scott Draves resulted in "In Transit," a multimedia work for live trumpet, computer music, and computer animation.
Roger Dannenberg also collaborated with Roberto Morales and Jonathan Berger to create three real-time pieces for dancer, 3D motion tracker, computer animation, and computer music. These pieces have been performed in Mexico City at the Foro de Musica Nuevo, the new music festival in Guanajuato, the Arts and Technologies Symposium at Connecticut College, and at CCRMA, Stanford University.
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