18:13
Virtual Reality DIY
iVibe.com is selling tactile feedback sits for $239.95 :
The TFSU itself is a thick and durable seat cushion made of the highest quality fabric laminated polyurethane foam. It will fit in the chair you already use right now. Contained within the TFSU are 6 powerful electromechanical actuators, arranged in 3 pairs: one pair in the back section, one pair in the left leg section, and one pair in the right leg section. All three zones can function independently or in unison. By having three independent zones, games that support intellivibe can render things such as vector based gforce, acceleration and braking cues, direction-based incoming flak, and just about any other thing you can think of.
You can use their SDK (not yet available) or let the system create effects based on the sound of your application :
AudioSense digitally samples the sound effects from your computer as they are generated in real time. It then uses a digital signal processing algorithm (that is uniquely customized for each specific game or simulation) to tell the TFS2 how to generate useful tactile feedback based upon this real time digital audio analysis.
This with the tactile vest makes a nice feedback setup =)
Tags: feedback, haptics, SDK, tactile, Virtual Reality DIY
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22:05
Game development, VR Devices, Virtual Reality DIY
Johnny Lee is definitely a genius.. After the Finger Tracking and the Wiimote whiteboard, here’s how with two Wiimotes he’s creating VR games at home !!
(not that we didn’t think about it, but hey.. he actually *did* it =)
If you want to have real 6Dof information from your Wiimote, check out Oliver Kreylos Wiimote projects.
Tags: Game development, hack, JohnnyLee, Parallax, tracking, Virtual Reality DIY, Wiimote
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10:23
Uncategorized
Here I’ll try to list references to documents on stereoscopic game development.
There is a chapter in the NVidia GPU Programming Guide about Stereoscopic Game Development (Chapter 9) with some useful tips about “How stereo works”, and “Things that hurt stereo”.
Why care about Stereo ?
People see with two eyes in the real world. While artificial stereoscopic viewing (on a screen versus in real life) is not a huge market, many gamers enjoy the extra sense of presence obtained by playing games with inexpensive shutter glasses along with NVIDIA’s stereo override driver.
In addition, there are benefits to viewing your game in stereo during development. You immediately pick up on things that look fake. Keep in mind that motion parallax gives similar visual cues to stereo but the stereo viewer perceives instantaneously what users see if they move around and obtain depth information via motion parallax.
Using stereoscopic viewing while developing a game is a competitive advantage; you see and correct visual defects before they even come out in a game. This of course will also enhance the experience of those who play your game in stereo.
For more extensive informations about stereoscopy for immersive applications, check out the Stereographics Developers Handbook.
For more information about the available stereoscopic displays, check Stereoscopy at home.
For technical information about asymetric frustums : Stereo geometry in OpenGL
Some rules to follow to create successful stereo effects : Stereoscopic 3D Film and Animation - Getting it right.
Tags: Game development, reference, resource, Stereoscopy, Virtual Reality DIY
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0:43
VR Devices, Virtual Reality DIY
A really clever use of the Wiimote, by Johnny Lee, from Carnegie Mellon University.
You might need WiiYourself! to read the position of 4 different dots. It’s the best Wiimote interface I found so far.
Tags: hack, JohnnyLee, Multi-touch, Virtual Reality DIY, Wiimote
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15:39
VR Displays, Virtual Reality DIY
The DLP 3D technology is reaching mass market!
This ZDNet article says that those TVs “which uses DLP-based rear projection and ranging in price from $1499 to $4500″.
Moreover, Mitsubishi is planning 3D Blu-Ray player for early 2008.
From the DLP official site :
DLP® 3-D HDTV System Requirements:
• A DLP® 3-D Ready HDTV offered by either Mitsubishi or Samsung
• VESA compatible LCD shutter glasses and sync signal transmitter
• Video or graphics source which shows 3-D pictures using DLP® HDTV 3-D format.
Advantages of DLP® 3-D HDTV technology
- The DLP® 3-D HDTV technology supplies a 60Hz frame rate signal to each eye (equivalent to 120 Hz).
- The technology has a virtually zero implementation cost on new DLP® HDTV, benefiting consumers with a future proof capability.
DLP® HDTV 3-D Image Format
3-D stereoscopic video content is sent to the TV digitally, through an HDMI or DVI port. Left and right stereo images are independently filtered, then sampled in an offset grid pattern. The resulting views are then combined, and appear as a left and right checkerboard pattern in a conventional orthogonal sampled image. This format preserves the horizontal and vertical resolution of the left and right views providing the viewer with the highest quality image possible with the available bandwidth.
This whitepaper has more information about the image format.
Tags: Active Stereoscopy, DLP, HDTV, mitsubishi, Norm, Projector, samsung, Stereoscopy, TV, Virtual Reality DIY, VR Displays
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20:21
Uncategorized
[Update 20 Nov 2008: Added a possible way to have up to date nVidia drivers with stereo]
[Update 17 Nov 2008 : Added list of stereoscopic drivers]
I’ve found some pretty interesting material about professionals and enthusiasts building up stereoscopic displays for home use:
- 3D Flight simulator has a lot of information about affordable stereoscopic displays, projectors, 3d-DLP TVs, and tutorials on how to setup your system.
- Here’s a forum which lists a lot of “cheap” projectors to do active stereo.
- Here’s a very recent pdf (aug 06) about the use of LCD monitors and DLP projectors for active stereo. The bottom line: no lcd monitor is good, lot of dlp projectors are good.
- By the same author, more recent, a technical paper about “The compatibility of consumer DLP projectors with time-sequential stereoscopic 3D visualisation” and a list of the results.
- A Stereo Emitter with long range and adjustable frame delay.
- A nice article at tom’s hardware : Wall-Sized 3D Displays: The ultimate gaming room
- Infos about DLP 3D HDTV & HD Projectors
- Stereoscopic drivers : IZ3D Drivers, TriDef Drivers, Vuzix Drivers , nVidia Stereoscopic drivers
- How to have nVidia Stereo drivers with recent drivers.
See also VR Resources for forums about stereoscopy.
Tags: Norm, Projector, reference, resource, Stereoscopy, TV, Virtual Reality DIY
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9:48
Game development, VR Devices, Virtual Reality DIY
The 3rdSpace® Vest from TN Games allows you to feel impacts of bullets and punches inside the game.
It works with air micro-compressors that generate impacts like “3 year old punching you” (words from a tester in the video below).
The sdk documentation looks like it’s really easy to program. You can choose between multiple effects (different guns, explosions, stab, acceleration, deceleration) for the 8 actuators :
The number of actuators and their power doesn’t seem that impressive, but I’m sure that if used well this could improve immersion, as in the Verdun application.
Tags: feedback, haptics, Immersion, vest, video, Virtual Reality DIY, VR Devices
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11:17
Game, VR Applications, VR Devices, VR Displays, Virtual Reality, Virtual Reality DIY
These three great days have been very intense; holding the booth, meeting people, attending conferences, trying hardware and applications, being a jury member for the student competition. First things first, here are some pictures I took there. I should have taken more of the show..
There was not much new hardware, especially hardly any new expensive hardware. The novelty came from the use of existing hardware and better software. It seems that VR is at last being democratized; people create customized and cheap input devices, use webcams, recycle hardware not meant for VR etc.
Read on for more..
Read more…
Tags: Conference, Game, lavalvirtual, tradeshow, Virtual Reality, Virtual Reality DIY, virtualreality, VR Applications, VR Devices, VR Displays
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18:36
VR Displays, Virtual Reality DIY
The eMagin Z800 was the closest thing to a good consumer HMD, at a somewhat affordable $599. The only reason why I didn’t buy it yet is that I haven’t been able to test it yet. But last week eMagin decided to increase the price to a much much less affordable $1,499.00, with the hardware being exactly the same ! ! !
It seems that eMagin is much less interested in gamers than in commercial an military applications, although their webpage still puts a lot of emphasize on gaming.
I’m really surprised and sad about that fact. Does it mean the market is still not ready? Will a price increase help the consumer market? Will the price decrease once the commercial market is good enough? Why don’t they make a commercial price and a consumer price, just like 3dConnexion Space Navigator SE?
For the last two weeks I have been able to test a Virtual Research V6 (640×480) and a Virtual Research 1280 (1280×1024) both with a 60° field of view diagonal. And guess what? the V6 is much more comfortable to use! Even if you have big pixels, having a constant head movement (read, you’re not still) and putting some antialising gives a really great immersion feeling.
This is due to the optic lens that stands between your eyes and the displays. The lens of the V6 is much more tolerant to where you put your eyes. Even if you’re not exactly where the eye is supposed to be, you won’t be bothered by the induced deformation. This is more a problem on the VR 1280, and much, much more a problem on the piSight Sensics.
I’d still like to try the eMagin z800 though, but also the Trimersion HMD which seems to have a tracking option.
Are they other options out there for an affordable 3D HMD, possibly with tracking?
Tags: emagin, HMD, Price, Virtual Reality DIY, VR Displays, z800
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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.
Tags: Virtools, Virtual Reality DIY, VR Devices, VRPack, Wiimote
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