Just a small post to show you a video of one of the most famous, old-school demos : Second Reality, by Future Crew (1993).
Back then you had to tweak your autoexec.bat and config.sys to get enough memory to run those beautiful demos. If you didn’t have a Gravis Ultrasound you didn’t always get sound. You also didn’t have any 3D card so know that this is all software rendering.
Merry Christmas 
9:11 
Tech, VR Devices
I’m just returning from IPT/EGVE 2007, more on that later.
There have been several interesting talks about BCI (Brain Computer Interfaces).
>> Wheelchair control from thought
The first one was from Prof. Dr. Gert Pfurtscheller from the Laboratory of Brain-Computer Interfaces, Graz University of Technology, Austria :
Wheelchair control from thought: Simulation in an immersive virtual environment.
Here are some notes I took during this session :
The first thing to know is that those BCIs don’t read your thoughts. They won’t be able to know when you think ‘I want to go left’. They ’simply’ discriminate between some thoughts, like thinking about moving your hands or feet by monitoring your motor cortex.
But you need different strategies to match patterns, because not everyone will be able to ‘create’ the good thought that will be detected. For example for one subject, thinking about left hand (to go left) vs right hand (to go right), didn’t work well. They found out that asking the subject to think about moving his two feet vs right hand movement could lead to 100% discrimination.
By examining only the feet motor zone in the brain, the patient successfully moved a wheelchair in a VE. You can see a video here, search for “EEG-based walking of a tetraplegic in virtual reality”
Moreover, some completely paralyzed patients can only communicate through thougts, so BCIs could improve their lives.
Yann Renard, who works with Anatole Lecuyer, has also explained to me that you can use another technique called the ’steady state’ : you bring your attention to an oscillation, like a visual blink or a sound, and the activity of the auditory or visual cortex is synchronised with the frequency of the oscillation.
More infos on BCI here : bci-info.org
>> Intuition
There was another talk by the Intuition Network (network of excellence focused on virtual reality) about Neural Interfaces, chaired by Roland Blach (Fraunhofer IAO, Stuttgart), with talks from Oliver Stefani (COAT Basel), Anatole Lecuyer (Inria) and Marc Erich Latoschik (University of Bielefeld).
Neural interfaces could be used in VEs, not necessarily to have control over it (control the movements etc..), but more as input for adapting the VE to the user.
A limiting factor is that these interfaces are not easy to setup, and the calibration procedure has to be potentially done for each different user.
An interesting fact that was demonstrated is that it seems that sometimes, when you do a mistake, your unconscious mind notices it, but you still go with the conscious decision of doing the action. You read that right, the conscious and unconscious mind are fighting over what’s right and wrong !
So they think that maybe one day the neural interfaces could be used to warn a user that he wants to perform an action but his unconscious mind doesn’t agree so maybe he should think about it.
You could also use them to adapt the VE dynamically and in realtime to adapt to previous behaviours, desires, and support for the user’s cognitive and perceptual internal schemes. You could also create augmented cognition interfaces, that would adapt based on the cognitive workload, stress etc.
>> OpenVibe
Anatole Lecuyer presented the OpenVibe project.
The goal of the OpenVibe project is to deliver a technological demonstrator and an OpenSource software to help developping BCI. As I don’t know the challenges of developping such applications, I can’t comment on the features of the software.
Anatole said that BCI can be used to improve VR, but VR can also improve BCI.
The results that I found the most interesting is that when using a BCI “helmet”, you only get electrical information from the surface of the brain. OpenVibe is able to recreate in realtime the3d electrical mental activity. This is useful for a more in depth information about the activity of brain zones. Moreover this allows to display in realtime and in 3D the activity of the brain. Maybe this realtime visualisation will allow us to have a better control on our brain activity and be able to modify it in realtime.
10:10 Tech
The excellent Sam Hocevar is now the new Debian Project Leader. Congratulations! I hope you’ll still have time for some beers
12:24 Tech, VR Displays
Just in case you haven’t already seen it this week.
Jeff Han and Phil Davidson are back to demonstrate their multi-touch interface.
embedPlayer(271543545)
14:05 Tech, VR Devices
Here’s a video of a project from Fab@Home, “a cheap self-assembly device capable of fabricating 3D objects” as described by News Scientist.
“We are trying to get this technology into as many hands as possible,” Malone told New Scientist. “The kit is designed to be as simple as possible.” Once the parts have been bought, a normal soldering iron and a few screwdrivers are enough to put it together.
(…)
Malone and Lipson hope Fab@Home will grow into a community of enthusiasts who share designs for 3D objects and even modify the machines for themselves. This will prompt the emergence of widespread personal fabrication, Lipson hopes.
(…)
“We think it’s a similar story to computers,” he explains. “Mainframes had existed for years, but personal computing only took off in the late seventies.” A cheap self-assembly computer called the Altair 8800, launched in 1975, sparked the rapid development of personal computing
(…)
Bowyer adds that (…) “I can imagine people swapping plans of things to make online, or paying to download them instead of going to the shop.”
14:05 Tech
I have decided to change my blog from DotClear to WordPress.
The change should be very smooth, but please tell me if you notice anything wrong.
I’ll update the design later. [Note: I have updated the design, but it’s not finalized yet.]
I have also added a new poll on the sidebar to know where you live. Yes I’m curious =)
Notes on migrating from DotClear to WordPress
Importing posts and comments
WordPress can import DotClear posts. I didn’t manage to import posts with french characters correctly because of some encoding hell.
The DotClear importer didn’t like to have that much posts to import, and complained something like :
Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 8388608 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 327859 bytes) in …
The only solution I found is to import posts little by little.
There is certainly a much better way to handle this, especially if you’re a SQL export, but I’m not, so here’s the hard way :
Keeping dotclear permalinks and rss/atom feeds
My dotclear permalinks used the postId in the url, so I have to get rid of it to match the wordpress format.
Dotclear :
http://cb.nowan.net/blog/index.php/2006/12/16/280-my-wii-and-the-child-in-all-of-us
WordPress :
http://cb.nowan.net/wblog/2006/12/16/my-wii-and-the-child-in-all-of-us/
If you want that the permalinks generated by dotclear be still valid, you have to use the mod_rewrite option of your apache server.
Same goes for rss/atom posts and comments feeds.
Check my .htaccess file.
20:57 Game, Product Review
By now you should all have had access to a Wii and been able to test it.
I got mine one week ago, and I have to say I’m really impressed. Okay, after seeing games like Doom3 and Gears of Wars, the look of the games may look less realistic.
But the Wii demonstrates quite powerfully that you don’t need pretty graphics to have a hell lot of fun and to really feel immersed.
Thanks to the Wiimote, gesture gives you an whole new world of immersion. Moreover, you start the Wii discovery by creating your avatar, a Mii, that will be used in all of the Wii Play and Wii Sports games, which is really nice. You can even share your Miis through the internet connection or store it on your Wiimote to use it on another Wii. This feels very.. romantic, in the poetic sense. It awakes the child inside me, just like when I’m watching a Miyazaki movie.
All of my friends, even the skeptics ones, enjoyed it instantly. I could see a childish smile on their face the first time they had to move they arm to hit a tennis ball.
A funny fact is that the non-gamers understood how to play generally faster than gamers. A girl literally crushed her boyfriend at tennis, although he made fun of her because she couldn’t play a FPS on GameCube. The same girl was so immersed in the fighting game that standing in a 1m perimeter around her was a real danger for your safety!
Another interesting feature is that it’s also really enjoyable for the spectators, especially the faces of the players, and their gestures in the air. That way you don’t have to wait for your turn to have fun.
The tennis is really good. The gameplay works for beginners as well as for ‘advanced’ players. At first you just have to get the ball on the other side, but when you get used to it, you can aim more or less where you want, and when you get the ball out, you almost always know that it’s because of your faulty movement.
The Rayman game is really fun. It has lots of funny games and interesting gameplays, making very different and original use of the Wiimotes. I’d say it’s a must-have, we had really good laughs and were impressed by atmosphere of the game. Nice graphics, lots of cool musics, and the rabbits are really.. dumb =)
I’ve only played the NES version of Zelda, so I’m really impressed by the gameplay. It’s very different from the games I’ve played; you have much more freedom of action and movement. I sometimes got stuck for a moment because I didn’t think such action could be performed. It really forces me to rethink my way of playing.
But I think it could have used the wiimote better. It feels like the wiimote features were added afterwards, which is certainly the case since the game was planned for the GameCube first.
Conclusion
I can’t wait to see what new interactions game developpers will create. I hope they’ll be creative, because the potential is really huge as Rayman demonstrates.
Anyway, the door is opened: let’s get 3d interaction for all !!
15:51 Tech
18:35 Tech
( through /. )
Here’s a “a new framework for spatio-temporal warping of video”. They are able to set different playing speeds to different parts of the same video!
Look at the swimmers race and demolition videos.
Select the winner in any race.
By enabling time to flow differently at different locations in the video, we create new videos with any desired winner.
Demolition: Customize the way you want the stadium to be blown: Starting at the sides or starting at the center?
This site is better viewed with :
