The 11th edition of Laval Virtual has been held from the 22th to the 26th of April 2009, and to me it was one of the nicest edition ever!
As the conference center was moved a bit further than usual, I didn’t take time to go there much. So I stayed on the tradeshow and took time to have long discussions and meet new people.
We’re seeing more commercial/industrial applications as well as nVidia’s push to democratize 3d displays.
We’ve already talked about Clarte’s R-Screen and Clarte’s Ergo-Wide3, but we didn’t talk about Clarte’s Sitac 3D!
It’s a military project aimed at displaying a tactical situation to help with decision making and training. The interface and interactions are really nice and intuitive :
[dailymotion]http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x9an0m_sitac_tech[/dailymotion]Crescent was also present with an improved version of their wide-angle HMD and an application made by ESCIN students called Acrophobia, where you have to walk on the edge of a building. I’ve seen a lot of people freaking out because of the induced fear of heights, demonstrating a high sense of presence!
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SinlgK5Q4v4[/youtube]nVidia 3D Vision
I’ve also been able to play with nVidia’s new stereoscopic system, 3D Vision :
(in fact I think their should be some drivers work for WinXP too..)
I have to say I was quite impressed by the quality of the stereo rendering, I’ll try to make a review when I can get my hands on this system for more time.
Augmented Reality
We’ve also already talked about the AR Games.
New User Interfaces
I could also test a neat MindManager software called MindFlow by Tony DaLuz from l’Ecole de Design de Nantes based on Immersion‘s multitouch table :
mindflow, demonstration in Laval Virtual from Toni Da Luz on Vimeo.
Immersion was also demonstrating its new cubic multitouch interface, the CubTile :
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8RYvE4yRo3A[/youtube]Robots
The MIT brought its impressive Nexi robot :
Speaking of robots, the University of Tsukuba also demonstrated a vision system to recognize hand gestures and have it mimick by a robotic hand :
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=siY2B4BO0kM[/youtube]Conclusion
Still no big revolution this year except the R-Screen! Augmented Reality is growing in interesting applications, VR commercial applications are getting more complex, nVidia is getting back to the consumer stereoscopic business and thanks to the AFRV, the conference quality is increasing.
So see you next year!
