owa 0.5.0a2

Everything you need to build state-of-the-art foundation multimodal desktop agent, end-to-end.

🚀 Open World Agents

Everything you need to build state-of-the-art foundation multimodal desktop agent, end-to-end.

Overview

Open World Agents is a comprehensive framework for building AI agents that interact with desktop applications through vision, keyboard, and mouse control. Complete toolkit from data capture to model training and evaluation:

• OWA Core & Environment: Asynchronous, event-driven interface for real-time agents with dynamic plugin activation
• Data Capture & Format: High-performance desktop recording with OWAMcap format - a specialized file format that captures screen recordings, keyboard/mouse events, and window information with nanosecond precision, powered by mcap
• Environment Plugins: Pre-built plugins for desktop automation, screen capture, and more
• CLI Tools: Command-line utilities for recording, analyzing, and managing agent data

What Can You Build?

Anything that runs on desktop. If a human can do it on a computer, you can build an AI agent to automate it.

🤖 Desktop Automation: Navigate applications, automate workflows, interact with any software
🎮 Game AI: Master complex games through visual understanding and real-time decision making
📊 Training Datasets: Capture high-quality human-computer interaction data for foundation models
🤗 Community Datasets: Access and contribute to growing OWAMcap datasets on HuggingFace
📈 Benchmarks: Create and evaluate desktop agent performance across diverse tasks

Project Structure

The repository is organized as a monorepo with multiple sub-repositories under the projects/ directory. Each sub-repository is a self-contained Python package installable via pip or uv and follows namespace packaging conventions.

open-world-agents/
├── projects/
│   ├── mcap-owa-support/     # OWAMcap format support
│   ├── owa-core/             # Core framework and registry system
│   ├── owa-msgs/             # Core message definitions with automatic discovery
│   ├── owa-cli/              # Command-line tools (ocap, owl)
│   ├── owa-env-desktop/      # Desktop environment plugin
│   ├── owa-env-example/      # Example environment implementations
│   ├── owa-env-gst/          # GStreamer-based screen capture
│   └── [your-plugin]/        # Contribute your own plugins!
├── docs/                     # Documentation
└── README.md

Core Packages

The easiest way to get started is to install the owa meta-package, which includes all core components and environment plugins:

pip install owa

All OWA packages use namespace packaging and are installed in the owa namespace (e.g., owa.core, owa.cli, owa.env.desktop). For more detail, see Packaging namespace packages. We recommend using uv as the package manager.

Name	Release in PyPI	Conda	Description
owa.core			Framework foundation with registry system
owa.msgs			Core message definitions with automatic discovery
owa.cli			Command-line tools (owl) for data analysis
mcap-owa-support			OWAMcap format support and utilities
ocap 🎥			Desktop recorder for multimodal data capture
owa.env.desktop			Mouse, keyboard, window event handling
owa.env.gst 🎥			GStreamer-powered screen capture (6x faster)
owa.env.example	-	-	Reference implementations for learning

🎥 Video Processing Packages: Packages marked with 🎥 require GStreamer dependencies. Install conda install open-world-agents::gstreamer-bundle first for full functionality.

📦 Lockstep Versioning: All first-party OWA packages follow lockstep versioning, meaning they share the same version number to ensure compatibility and simplify dependency management.

💡 Extensible Design: Built for the community! Easily create custom plugins like owa-env-minecraft or owa-env-web to extend functionality.

Community Packages

Help us grow the ecosystem! 🌱 Community-contributed environment plugins extend OWA's capabilities to specialized domains.

Example plugin ideas from the community:

Example Name	Description
owa.env.minecraft	Minecraft automation & bot framework
owa.env.web	Browser automation via WebDriver
owa.env.mobile	Android/iOS device control
owa.env.cad	CAD software automation (AutoCAD, SolidWorks)
owa.env.trading	Financial trading platform integration

💡 Want to contribute? Check our Plugin Development Guide to create your own owa.env.* package!

💭 These are just examples! The community decides what plugins to build. Propose your own ideas or create plugins for any domain you're passionate about.

Desktop Recording with ocap

ocap (Omnimodal CAPture) is a high-performance desktop recorder that captures screen video, audio, keyboard/mouse events, and window events in synchronized formats. Built with Windows APIs and GStreamer for hardware-accelerated recording with H265/HEVC encoding.

• Complete recording: Video + audio + keyboard/mouse + window events
• High performance: Hardware-accelerated, ~100MB/min for 1080p
• Simple usage: ocap my-recording (stop with Ctrl+C)
• Modern formats: MKV for video, MCAP for events

📖 Detailed Documentation: See Desktop Recording Guide for complete setup, usage examples, and troubleshooting.

Quick Start

Basic Environment Usage

import time
from owa.core import CALLABLES, LISTENERS, MESSAGES

# Components and messages automatically available - no activation needed!

def callback():
    time_ns = CALLABLES["std/time_ns"]()
    print(f"Current time: {time_ns}")

# Access message types through the global registry
KeyboardEvent = MESSAGES['desktop/KeyboardEvent']
print(f"Available message: {KeyboardEvent}")

# Create a listener for std/tick event (every 1 second)
tick = LISTENERS["std/tick"]().configure(callback=callback, interval=1)

# Start listening
tick.start()
time.sleep(2)
tick.stop(), tick.join()

High-Performance Screen Capture

import time
from owa.core import CALLABLES, LISTENERS, MESSAGES

# Components and messages automatically available - no activation needed!

def on_screen_update(frame, metrics):
    print(f"📸 New frame: {frame.frame_arr.shape}")
    print(f"⚡ Latency: {metrics.latency*1000:.1f}ms")

    # Access screen message type from registry
    ScreenCaptured = MESSAGES['desktop/ScreenCaptured']
    print(f"Frame message type: {ScreenCaptured}")

# Start real-time screen capture
screen = LISTENERS["gst/screen"]().configure(
    callback=on_screen_update, fps=60, show_cursor=True
)

with screen.session:
    print("🎯 Agent is watching your screen...")
    time.sleep(5)

Plugin Management with CLI

Explore and manage plugins using the enhanced owl env command:

# List all discovered plugins with enhanced display
$ owl env list --details --table

# Show detailed plugin information with component inspection
$ owl env show example --components --inspect add

# Search for components across all plugins
$ owl env search "mouse.*click" --table

# Quick exploration shortcuts
$ owl env ls desktop                              # Quick namespace exploration
$ owl env find keyboard                           # Quick component search
$ owl env namespaces                              # List all available namespaces

# Ecosystem analysis and health monitoring
$ owl env stats                                   # Show ecosystem statistics
$ owl env health                                  # Perform health check

Message Management with CLI

Explore and manage message types using the new owl messages command:

# List all available message types
$ owl messages list

# Show detailed message schema
$ owl messages show desktop/KeyboardEvent

# Search for specific message types
$ owl messages search keyboard

# Validate message definitions
$ owl messages validate

Powered by the powerful Gstreamer and Windows API, our implementation is 6x faster than comparatives.

Library	Avg. Time per Frame	Relative Speed
owa.env.gst	5.7 ms	⚡ 1× (Fastest)
pyscreenshot	33 ms	🚶‍♂️ 5.8× slower
PIL	34 ms	🚶‍♂️ 6.0× slower
MSS	37 ms	🚶‍♂️ 6.5× slower
PyQt5	137 ms	🐢 24× slower

📌 Tested on: Intel i5-11400, GTX 1650

Not only does owa.env.gst achieve higher FPS, but it also maintains lower CPU/GPU usage, making it the ideal choice for screen recording. Same applies for ocap, since it internally imports owa.env.gst.

Desktop Recording & Dataset Sharing

Record your desktop usage data and share with the community:

# Install GStreamer dependencies (for video recording) and ocap
conda install open-world-agents::gstreamer-bundle && pip install ocap

# Record desktop activity (includes video, audio, events)
ocap my-session

# Upload to HuggingFace, browse community datasets!
# Visit: https://huggingface.co/datasets?other=OWA

Access Community Datasets

🚧 TODO: Community dataset access functionality is under development.

# Load datasets from HuggingFace
from owa.data import load_dataset

# Browse available OWAMcap datasets
datasets = load_dataset.list_available(format="OWA")

# Load a specific dataset
data = load_dataset("open-world-agents/example_dataset")

Data Format Preview

$ owl mcap info example.mcap
library:   mcap-owa-support 0.3.2; mcap 1.2.2
profile:   owa
messages:  1062
duration:  8.8121584s
start:     2025-05-23T20:04:01.7269392+09:00 (1747998241.726939200)
end:       2025-05-23T20:04:10.5390976+09:00 (1747998250.539097600)
compression:
        zstd: [1/1 chunks] [113.42 KiB/17.52 KiB (84.55%)] [1.99 KiB/sec]
channels:
        (1) keyboard/state    9 msgs (1.02 Hz)    : desktop/KeyboardState [jsonschema]
        (2) mouse/state       9 msgs (1.02 Hz)    : desktop/MouseState [jsonschema]
        (3) window            9 msgs (1.02 Hz)    : desktop/WindowInfo [jsonschema]
        (4) screen          523 msgs (59.35 Hz)   : desktop/ScreenCaptured [jsonschema]
        (5) mouse           510 msgs (57.87 Hz)   : desktop/MouseEvent [jsonschema]
        (6) keyboard          2 msgs (0.23 Hz)    : desktop/KeyboardEvent [jsonschema]
channels: 6
attachments: 0
metadata: 0

Installation

Quick Start

# Install all OWA packages
pip install owa

# For video recording/processing, install GStreamer dependencies first:
conda install open-world-agents::gstreamer-bundle
pip install owa

💡 When do you need GStreamer?

• Video recording with ocap desktop recorder
• Real-time screen capture with owa.env.gst
• Video processing capabilities

Skip GStreamer if you only need:

• Data processing and analysis
• ML training on existing datasets
• Headless server environments

Editable Install (Development)

For development or contributing to the project, you can install packages in editable mode. For detailed development setup instructions, see the Installation Guide.

Features

• 🔄 Asynchronous Processing: Real-time event handling with Callables, Listeners, and Runnables
• 🧩 Zero-Configuration Plugin System: Automatic plugin discovery via Entry Points
• 📊 High-Performance Data: 6x faster screen capture with GStreamer integration
• 🤗 HuggingFace Ecosystem: Access growing collection of community OWAMcap datasets
• 🗂️ OWAMcap Format: Specialized file format capturing complete desktop interactions (screen + keyboard + mouse + windows) with perfect synchronization
• 🛠️ Extensible: Community-driven plugin ecosystem

Documentation

• Full Documentation: https://open-world-agents.github.io/open-world-agents/
• Environment Guide: docs/env/
• Data Format: docs/data/
• Plugin Development: docs/env/custom_plugins.md

Contributing

We welcome contributions! Whether you're:

• Building new environment plugins
• Improving performance
• Adding documentation
• Reporting bugs

Please see our Contributing Guide for details.

License

This project is released under the MIT License. See the LICENSE file for details.

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🚧 Work in Progress: We're actively developing this framework. Stay tuned for more updates and examples!