hands/ft-cutouts on|off|status starts ft-camd and ft-hands as transient
user units with ft-hands' new --no-gestures: hands are published for
ft-screens' cutouts, but no pinch or grip is detected, so nothing clicks
or drags and a closing hand doesn't raise the tracking rate. It needs a
build and ft-camd's capabilities, not hands/run.sh install. Its units
conflict with ft-handsctl's, so each stops the other, and they stop with
SteamVR.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
- install.sh no longer offers hand tracking (it's heavy on the CPU and
needs more work); hands/ still builds and installs by hand
- the build container drops python3-opencv and python3-numpy, which
only hand tracking's tools used: Fedora's OpenCV pulls in over a GB
- README: a new opening and feature list, the Use section by topic
(screens, mouse, floating windows, profiles, gaze), and new known
limitations
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
- frame_sudo (scripts/_env.sh) replaces three copies of sudo_run. On
the Frame it asks in the terminal even when stdin isn't one, which
install.sh's steps never had: saying yes to the Bluetooth fixes or
hand tracking stopped the install with "no terminal for sudo".
From a PC it asks through ssh -t when .env has no password.
- start_with_steamvr: the pointer, power, and gaze services restart
when SteamVR runs (a re-install runs the new code) and are left to
start with it when it doesn't, instead of failing the install.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
- floating-windows.md and profiles.md describe what's built, with what
isn't listed as such; the plans, phases, and branch notes are gone
- hands-migration.md is gone: the move is done; its open items are in
hands/README.md's Known issues
- reference.md: Layout & profiles, every action, key combinations,
floating windows, the gaze pointer, and hand tracking as they are
- design.md gets the KWin findings from floating-windows.md
- README, gaze/README, AGENTS, hazards, gaze-controllers, and the
example config catch up with gaze, hands, and the stuck-key fix
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
- gaze/tracker/lab/eyes_track.py: nothing used it
- Input Settings: the pointer role backend, whose page was removed
- ft-screens: no log line for every floating-window resize
- hands: ft-hands --help gives the palm-down default (1: off), the
uninstall removes ft-handsctl's link, .frame-job is ignored
- Display Settings: "Save as profile…", not "Save current arrangement"
- two stale comments (ft-pointer's grabprobe, ft-gaze)
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Hand tracking no longer starts with SteamVR: hands/run.sh install leaves
the units disabled and links hands/ft-handsctl into ~/.local/bin, which
turns it on and off (on | off | status | log | cutouts on|off | gestures).
With it on, hands show through the screens; pinches and grips move the
pointer only with POINTER_HANDS=1, now off by default. ft-camd's service
runs the mono cameras only: while the headset is worn, the colour module
writes just a half-size image into the top-left quarter of its buffers,
which ft-camd can't use yet.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
- The palm-down filter is off by default: the user's deliberate pinches,
hand raised, read 0.90-0.99, like typing.
- Typing is told apart by the keyboard instead: the input relay sends the
pointer helper "typing" on key presses, and it takes no pinch within
POINTER_PINCH_TYPING (1 s) of one.
- Grips are still held to hands raised (POINTER_GRIP_BELOW, 0.35 m below
the eyes); pinches aren't, since the user's own sat 0.35-0.45 m below,
elbow resting.
- A grip doesn't begin with the thumb on the index tip: that's a pinch
with the other fingers curled, which was taken for a grip.
- A pinch's point is the index and middle knuckles: the tips' midpoint
moved 1-2 cm as the pinch opened, dragging every release off its press.
- ft-hands --gesture-log prints what the detectors measure, 10 times a
second.
Pinches still aren't reliable enough to use; hand tracking is parked for
now in favour of the controllers.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
ft-hands tracks with the mono IR cameras in dim light and with every
camera (or the colour pair, HANDS_BRIGHT) in bright light, going by the
colour frames' mean brightness with hysteresis and a 2 s hold
(HANDS_CAMERAS=auto, the default; mono, color and all fix it). Colour
frames are placed on the mono cameras' clock by their dequeue time, and a
view in a camera a step lacks waits for that camera's next frame.
A grip (a closed hand) is a second gesture next to the pinch, in version 2
of the gestures file: every fingertip curled toward the wrist, beginning
only on a hand seen open within a second and held up in front. On the
2026-09-30 lit recording that leaves 6 false grips of 14, all with the
hands on the desk; pinch counts are unchanged. ft-handreplay logs grips
and finger curl, watch_gestures.py shows them, and tools/cut_sets.py
copies a few sets out of a recording.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
A colour camera probes at most 4 buffers a frame (each probe syncs a
~9 MB buffer's cache, which made the mono cameras miss frames), and one
that goes stale twice in a row is paused (10 s, doubling to 160 s) and
learned again instead of ft-camd exiting. The colour cameras run at 2 fps
until a reader asks for more in frametop-hands/color-fps, which saves
most of their decoding while only their brightness is needed. Each mono
camera's latest near-black frame's mean goes in the ring (dark_mean), a
measure of the room's IR light. The service now starts with --with-color;
HANDS_CAMERAS=mono leaves the colour cameras out.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
- The runtime files move to /run/user/UID/frametop-hands/: the desktop
session deletes /run/user/UID/frametop at every start.
- The cutout copy shader runs at highp: mediump (16-bit on Adreno)
stepped 1.7 texels across a 3440-pixel screen.
- One hand no longer pinches both sides after its left/right call flips
mid-pinch, and --pinch-palm-down (0.6) holds back pinches with the palm
facing down (typing on a lap keyboard).
- ft-camd judges a colour frame fresh by its luma rows only, and logs
per-buffer changes at stale colour frames with FT_CAMD_DEBUG=1.
- hands/run.sh caps skips the setcap when ft-camd already has them.
- The replay tool dumps poses (--poses), and its pinch events carry the
hand id.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
- Programs: ft-camd (the camera broker), ft-hands (the tracker), and
ft-handreplay and ft-ringplay for recordings, built by hands/build.sh
into hands/build/ with one Makefile. The first build fetches ncnn at
frame-hands' pinned tag and builds it with the same options.
- ft-camd gets its privileges from file capabilities (CAP_SYS_PTRACE,
CAP_PERFMON, CAP_DAC_READ_SEARCH) that hands/run.sh install sets with
sudo, and drops them once set up. It still works under sudo. It runs
on the host, linked statically, as frametop-camd.service. ft-hands
runs in the dev container as frametop-hands.service. Both start and
stop with SteamVR.
- Files move to /run/user/UID/frametop/ (cam-ring, hands, gestures),
not $XDG_RUNTIME_DIR, which a terminal in the Frametop desktop has
its own of. SIGUSR1 recordings go to ~/.local/share/frametop/hands.
- The calibration is read through /run/host in the container.
- Settings: HANDS_SWAP_SIDES and HANDS_CPUS in frametop.conf.
- install.sh offers hand tracking as an optional last step.
- The container gets jsoncpp-devel, glibc-static, and NumPy and OpenCV
for the Python tools.
- tools/ring.py reads the ring, and models/NOTICE credits the
Apache-2.0 models.
Checked: ft-handreplay gives identical summaries and byte-identical
depth dumps to frame-hands' fh-replay on both 2026-09-29 recordings.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
trackd/ becomes track/, and the calibration helper the Python tools
import moves from the prototype's folder into tools/. The model
development tools (nettest and the scripts that compare it with the
Python models or cut int8 calibration crops) stay in frame-hands with
the prototype they need.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The history of frame-hands (~/Desktop/Projects/frame-hands on the
Frame), filtered to what moves: the camera broker (camd/), the tracker
and its offline tools (trackd/), the shared file layouts (include/), the
ncnn models, the analysis tools, and the calibration and model helpers
they import from the Python prototype. The reverse-engineering notes,
probes, camprobe, and the rest of the prototype stay in frame-hands.
Unchanged here: the renames to ft- names and Frametop paths follow.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
