I’m back from Louisiana after having spent a few days visiting the state and especially New Orleans which is a really nice city ! I’ll put some pictures here soon and I hope to have some time to say more things about IEEE VR.

Following the (hopefully) prophetic video of World Builder, here’s a start of useful 3DUI.

Maxim Lysak, fellow reader, is working with Victor Kuropyatnik on a software called DIVA – Database Immersive Visual Analysis.

Their point is that it would be easier to understand the structure of a database by looking at it in 3D. It would also be easier to remember it visually.

And it looks really nice! At last something that looks like what you see in movies and could be useful =)

Any researcher wants to do some analysis of this technique compared to 2D exploration ?

On their website you can see more videos explaining the concepts, download a demo or buy the product.

Diva is created using Quest 3D, C++ and Direct 3D.

Read after the jump for an interview of Maxim and Victor,  some homebrew VR and more videos !

Read more…

The GlobeFish is a new device showed at IEEE VR 2009 by the team of Prof. Dr. Bernd Fröhlich.  In a nutshell it’s an improved spacemouse which is easier to use when using rotations.

From their webpage :

The Globefish consists of a custom three degrees of freedom trackball which is elastically suspended within a surrounding frame. The trackball, suitable for being precisely hold from two opposing sides, can be slightly moved in all spatial directions to induce translational input. Rotational input is generated by simply rotating the sphere.

Here is it in action, presented by Alexander Kulik and André Kunert :

So you heard the message, if you want to sell this great device contact Alexander Kulik !

I’m still in Lafayette, Louisiana, attending the IEEE VR 2009 conference. We’re eating lots of hamburgers but the conference is just fabulous, I’ll try to talk to you about that soon.

In the meantime, I’ve had the chance to bump into VR Geeks idol Jaron Lanier, early VR pioneer and “inventer” of the term “virtual reality”.

He just received an IEEE VR award for his career, and his acceptance speech was really inspiring. Maybe the organizers will put a video of that online ?

Anyway, during the day I jumped on him as he was passing by the Virtools booth and interviewed him with some questions. I’m sure I could have thought about better questions but I didn’t really prepare for that and was quite overwhelmed =)

His last answer is a summary of what he said during the reception tonight and I’m sure you’ll like it =)

“VR is the coolest technology you can be working on!”

I couldn’t agree more =)

PS: Here’s the article I was talking about.

I’m leaving for IEEE VR in Lafayette, Louisiana, see you there

Here’s a nice video (by Bruce Branit) of what creating worlds in VR could look like :

World Builder from Bruce Branit on Vimeo.

I’ve had the great honnor to be invited by Betty Mohler, who is currently working at the Max Planck Institute in Tuebingen, Germany, to come and visit their research projects that use VR.
Part of what they do there is to try and understand the biological basis for our perception, especially movement perception.

The Biological Cybernetics department is headed by Professor Heinrich Buelthoff who is a strong believer in high-level VR tools as a way to focus on experiments and not lose time by reprogramming basic components.

Read after the jump if you want to know more about your body and the crazy VR systems they have there!

Read more…