15:29 
Virtual Reality
Back at Laval Virtual, David did a lot of videos for internal DS communication of applications made with Virtools VR Pack. They have now released the videos on Youtube here!
Warning, it’s a bit corporate 
I’ve also added some of those to the State of VR .
Here are some :
17:41 Game development
The 3d3 competition is “rewarding the best students’ projects using Virtools, in the field of real time 3d creation”. Here are some photos I took during the event. Some of the games presented looked really great, and as usual students impress me by their incredible work!
17:32 Augmented Reality, VR Devices
Back at IPT/EGVE, Intersense was presenting its MictroTrax and new Wand. The head tracker is really small, and the wand is smaller. It can fit on cheap, lightweight passive stereo glasses without any problem. I did the setup of their installation in no time, it’s all VRPN compatible already (except for the trigger but that should be easy and fast to fix).
They had also a new tracker, the IS-1200 VisTracker. All their trackers use an internal inertial tracker (accelerometers, gyroscopes and magnetometer), which have very fast update rates, but tend to drift. The IS-900 trackers use ultrasound emitters to recalibrate this drift. The VisTracker instead uses a camera that matches Augmented Reality patterns anywhere in your room.
Intersense had sent us the tracker and the associated UMPC so that we could setup Virtools demos.
- The VisTracker, mounted on a UMPC Vaio UX 280 -
- The AR patterns -
- A close-up of the UMPC -
The UMPC is a Sony Vaio UX 280, running on Windows XP which has an Intel CPU at 1.2GHZ with 1Gb of RAM. Virtools runs perfectly on this. The display is really bright. The only problem is the size of the keys! Maybe with a virtual laser keyboard this would be more practical.
I believe there is still some work to do for the tracking to work flawlessly. The inertial tracker drifts quite fast, and it takes a couple of seconds for the camera to recalibrate when if finds an AR pattern. Once it has two in sight it works quite fine excepts that it sometimes loses the patterns every now and then.
With this system you can print your own AR patterns, stick them anywhere in your building, register their position in the software. This allows you to be precisely tracked in a potentially huge surface for a flat fee!
Here’s an official video :
15:47 VR Applications
As said by Olivier, you can now book a seat for the first public Kheops event at La Géode in Paris, on Thursday, 24 mai at 20h00. The theory of Jean-Pierre Houdin on the construction of the Kheops/Khufu pyramid explained on the biggest VR screen !
Don’t miss it !!
17:14 VR Applications
17:36 Game, VR Applications
The guys that made Atrium, Alex Bouchet and Lionel Dominjon, are very cool guys, they gave us the sources of the first VR only FPS! Geoffrey modified it to use the VRNR, Virtools VR abstraction, so that the game is abstracted from the knowledge of the devices/display. Thus it can run on nearly any VR hardware, simply by changing a few configuration lines. We’re thinking about including that with the VR library, what do you think?
This is what VR Geeks do when their day is off :
Related Posts : Atrium Experience, Virtools VRPack in action
23:52 VR Devices, Virtual Reality DIY
At last, the use of a Wiimote inside Virtools! You don’t even need a specific BB, only read values from a virtual joystick or emulate keystrokes.
Thanks to Carl Kenner for GlovePie and Deon van der Westhuysen for PPJoy.
(Sorry for the darkness of videos..)
GlovePie allows you to emulate keystrokes, mouse movement and joystick movements depending on other devices input or events. For example if your Wiimote X acceleration vector is more than a certain threshold, you can script GlovePie so that it simulates a keystroke on the Left key. If your game uses the Left key, using the Wiimote will have the same behavior. Or move the mouse left …
PPJoy allows the creation of virtual joysticks in Windows. You then script Glove Pie to map the Wiimote datas to this virtual joystick, effectively enabling the Wiimote in any joystick-based game. Or in Virtools, simply use a Joystick Waiter.
The car demo shows the use of GlovePie to emulate keystrokes. The tilt and roll demo is using the values of the accelerometers to compute the tilt and roll angle of the Wiimote.
Getting the yaw (heading orientation) needs the sensor bar. The translations are also kind of hard to extract, since you don’t know if an acceleration is due to a rotation or a translation (see Wiimote Motion Analysis for more on this). But David said he’ll give it a try, so let’s wait =)
Here’s the Pie script for the Car composition (which you can find in your VRPack/Samples/Tests folder), the Pie script for the tilt/roll and the CMO.
23:28 Game, VR Applications
Here are two videos demonstrating interesting (read “fun”) uses of VR. Lightsaber and 3d modelling!
Related article : VR FPS : Atrium Experience
10:07 Game development, VR Applications
Here’s a funky commercial presenting the range of applications you can create with Virtools.
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