Is there a command to get the average position of currently selected objects or components in Maya? (Maya 2016, Python, Mel)

Question

Is there a Mel or Python command that returns the average position of the currently selected objects and/or components? I know that in component selection mode, selecting a set of vertices will cause the manipulator context to move to accommodate the selected vertices, but this does not seem to work in object mode.

In either case, my goal is to be able to easily obtain the average translation of the selected objects/components without having to write code specific to each sort of thing that may be selected.

Answer 1

you could try getting the world space position of all of the objects and then averaging it yourself - maybe something like this?

import maya.cmds as mc

sel = mc.ls(sl=True, fl=True)
count = len(sel)
sums = [0,0,0]
for item in sel:
    pos = mc.xform(item, q=true, t=True)
    sums[0] += pos[0]
    sums[1] += pos[1]
    sums[2] += pos[2]
center = [sums[0]/count, sums[1]/count, sums[2]/count]

*Note: edited based on some comments below