Salto (software)

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Salto is a software title for creating interactive applications. It is developed by Alterface.

Salto is a real-time interaction engine, not a content authoring tool. It makes use of pre-existing contents (images, sounds, movies, 3D scenes) created with other tools from the market (3D Studio Max, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Premiere etc.).

Salto added-value is its capacity to integrate any type of sensor and actuator, which makes it a software engine from which many interactive systems can be devised, from interactive kiosks to interactive shows and theaters.

Suffering from a lack of user-friendliness for non programmers, Salto is a flexible and powerful tool which allows to quickly create astounding interactions without needing to start from scratch every time. The tool will become of more interest to non programmers when an authoring tool will be available.

[edit] Software Description

Salto is a software engine which is easily programmed in XML to create interactive applications. Contrarily to other tools on the market (such as Adobe Flash or Macromedia Director), Salto founding principle is to muse external sensors, beyond the traditional keyboard and mouse interaction devices. The tool is therefore mainly used in the edutainment domain, typically to create physical interaction setups for museums and amusement parks.

Salto proposes a complete separation between technology and contents. The engine takes as argument an XML file which instantiates a particular application by describing:

First, the used sensors, along with the signal processing to be applied to the grabbed data.
Secondly, the necessary content elements (external resources stored on the hard drive).
Thirdly, the influence of the former ones on the later, i.e. the interactive scenario that makes the application.

Programmers can also develop new plugins in C++ in order to extend the sensing and actuating features of the engine.