If you’re in Paris on the November 4th, you may consider going to the first Immersion Lounge where you will be able to test Sensics HMD.

The french company Immersion will showcase the xSight (wide FOV and Full HD) and the zSight, lighter and optionnaly wireless.

Here’s the invitation. See you there !

Fellow reader Brett Jones sent me a video of his (and his team) work that they’re currently presenting at ISMAR, the AR conference :

Build Your World and Play In It: Interacting with Surface Particles on Complex Objects (ISMAR 2010) from Brett Jones on Vimeo.

The system scans the environment and then allows the user to interact with it using an IR stylus and UI elements that automatically adapt depending on the underlying physical surface.

We present a novel way of interacting with everyday objects by representing content as interactive surface particles. Users can build their own physical world, map virtual content onto their physical construction and play directly with the surface using a stylus. A surface particle representation allows programmed content to be created independent of the display object and to be reused on many surfaces. We demonstrated this idea through a projector-camera system that acquires the object geometry and enables direct interaction through an IR tracked stylus. We present three motivating example applications, each displayed on three example surfaces. We discuss a set of interaction techniques that show possible avenues for structuring interaction on complicated everyday objects, such as Surface Adaptive GUIs for menu selection. Through an informal evaluation and interviews with end users, we demonstrate the potential of interacting with surface particles and identify improvements necessary to make this interaction practical on everyday surfaces.

You can read the full paper here.

That’s a really nice way to interact with your everyday environment  without the need to wear (badly calibrated/tracked) AR glasses !

DigitalTrends has made a nice visit to Ford’s VR facilities (which I already talked about here), notably the Programmable Vehicle Model (PVM) and the Digital Preassembly Lab, but also the VIRTTEX driving simulator :

There are two things I particularly like about the PVM and the digital assembly :

- Passive haptics: having real objects match virtual objects and obstacles. This improves immersion greatly, and is much easier to setup than real haptics.

- Empathy testing: testing the vehicle with your actual body, then test it with the body of a shorter man, or a taller woman. Feel what it’s like to be in a body different than yours ! Mel Slater is also investigating this issue.

With all that I’m confident we can say that VR has reached the Slope of Enlightenment (even if Gartner is not yet aware of it).

A quick technical note. I’ve been struggling to read the videos of my Fuji W1 3D Camera because they are encoded in MJPEG which is not a very standard format. The 3D Vision player can read them, but my dear Stereo Video Maker (great, great FREE 3d video program, along with its twin brother Stereo Photo Maker) could not, complaining that I was missing the right codec.

If you search the web you’ll only find crappy, so-called free codecs that are in fact commercial ones that you’ll need to pay at one point or another.

So finally I found that the free FFDShow codecs could read Mjpeg files, but that also needs some configuration.

So after having installed those, go to “VFW configuration” (not “Video codec configuration”), go into the Decoder tab, locate the MJPEG line, and in the Decoder column, double-click and select libavcodec. You should be ok now !!

If you’re a VR Geek, you’ve probably already bumped into Cave Unreal Tournament (CaveUT), an adaptation of the Unreal engine to run in CAVEs and create VR applications. I’ve had the chance to meet its creator Jeffrey Jacobson at IEEE VR 2010 where he co-organized the “What is VR ?” panel. He’s also the director of PublicVR, “a Non-Profit organization dedicated to free software and methods for using Virtual Reality in education and research.”

He was in Paris for the VAST International Symposium on Virtual Reality, Archaeology and Cultural Heritage, so I invited him home for some VR chat and to show off my home-VR system.

He also took the time to answer some questions about the definition of VR, CaveUT and of course a message to VR Geeks

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