The CirculaFloor is back !

From this article at BotJunkie :

A 5 meter square of area is sufficient for continuous movement in any direction. The tiles also incorporate lifts sufficient to replicate the feeling of climbing stairs… After you step up, the tile slowly descends, bringing you back to ground level in time to step up onto the next tile.

The original CirculaFloor system used magnets attached to the user’s shoes along with sensors in the tiles to figure out the direction of movement.

Using two wiimotes and a simple calibration step, Simon Hay and his team of the Cambridge University are able to track a single LED using stereovision algorithms :

Ok now please somebody write an opensource software to handle any number of Wiimotes to do whole body tracking on a large area !

Yay! The girls and boys from Int 13 (who were already interviewed on this very blog) have just released videos of their upcoming AR game.

The game should be available this summer for iPhone, Windows Mobile and Smartphones Nokia a bit later.

The CRVM , VR research center in sunny Marseille, south of France, had the greatest idea of publishing lots of the videos of their work (in french). (I’m sure you can guess what software they’re using..)

Here are some of them :

Slideshow : Technical aspects and main applications.

Here are two ways of building a 3D scanner with a webcam and a laser !

This article from TechRadar is one, and this article from Instructables is another.

Know How to Make a 3-D Scanner

Navidget is a really nice navigation technique developped by Martin Hachet and his team (they also organized the VRST 2008 conference and created the CAT 6DOF input device).

Navidget is a new interaction technique for camera positioning in 3D environments. (…) Navidget does not attempt to automatically estimate where and how the user wants to move. Instead, it provides good feedback and control for fast and easy interactive camera positioning. Navidget can also be useful for distant inspection when used with a preview window.

This new 3D User interface is totally based on 2D inputs. As a result, it is appropriate for a wide variety of visualization systems, from small handheld devices to large interactive displays. A user study on TabletPC shows that the usability of Navidget is very good for both expert and novice users. Apart from these tasks, the Navidget approach can be useful for further purposes such as collaborative work and animation.

The site has lots of photos, videos and you can also download a demo !

Thanks for sharing your work Martin !