Time information and realistic animations

[DraTeots]

Dear developers,
As I saw the examples, event data of them don't have actual time information. So two questions:

1. Is it correct that currently phoenix doesn't works anyhow with the right times and the animation is just a visual effect.
2. Are there plans to work with timing information and provide realistic animations?

The background of the question, at HallD in Jefferson Lab was this event viewer:

https://halldweb.jlab.org/talks/2018/HDvis-Video/js/event.html#

It is not fancy but has real time information from the experiment. And our experience of using it was that it gave very valuable debugging information for people working on the real data reconstruction. At least it almost instantly revealed several bugs and lead to several enhancements. So it was proven to be valuable.

Now I'm one of developers working on EIC Athena collaboration software. And we desperately want to start working on something to better represent our simulation/reconstruction data and for sure phoenix effort is something that we seriously consider to join.

[EdwardMoyse]

Hi Dmitri,

This has been raised before and it's certainly something we'd be interested in supporting. Adding the time information to the Event Data Model (EDM) would be the first step, and should be pretty trivial. What is your event format? Do you have any examples we could look at?

Secondly we need to work out how to animate this - this is probably quite a bit more work, but still doable.

What might be a good idea is if you could join a Phoenix developer chat (Wednesday at 3pm, Central European Time) so we can discuss this "in person"

[9inpachi]

Hi Dmitry,

If you would like to dig into the code a bit, you can take a look at the AnimationsManager which handles all the animation stuff.

Now based on the event viewer you shared, we also have ways to animate the camera through the scene. It's possible to pretty much do any kind of animation without having to dive deep into the Phoenix core and just updating the AnimationsManager. There is also a possibility to just use Phoenix as a dependency and handle the animations in another project entirely.

All in all, introducing and handling time information in animations shouldn't be unrealistically hard but it heavily depends on the requirements and how generic we want it to be.