Updates

[23 Jul 2008: Added Optical Tracking video]

[6.03.08: Added Magnetic Haptics text&video]

[24.01.08: Added CirculaFloor video]

[21.01.08 : Added Virtusphere video]

Index

- Computers

- Tracking

- Gloves

- Haptics

- Locomotion

Computers

Not so long ago, a VR system required a million-dollar supercomputer. Nowadays the top VR systems are using clusters of desktop computers, dramatically reducing the price and maintenance costs.

Tracking

To be able to interact with a virtual world, the computer needs to know where your body stands through input devices called trackers.

The most common trackers used to be magnetic trackers, (Polhemus, Ascension) but they require cables (except the new Polhemus Patriot Wireless) and can lose precision as the magnetic field is perturbed by metal.

(c) Polhemus

(c) Ascension

The new trend is to use optical tracking (A.R.T, Vicon, Motion Analysis, IO Tracker, Natural Point) by putting inexpensive markers on your body and watching them through special video cameras. This technique has the advantage of being wireless and is becoming cheaper and cheaper, with motion capture solutions starting at 5’000$.

(c) Natural Point

Inertial tracking (XSens) is another very interesting option: it is standalone and very responsive, but has the disadvantage that positional data are drifting very fast (even though a full body capture is greatly improving the stability). Orientation data are pretty stable. But this solution isn’t (yet) ready for a precise head tracking required to generate a correct perspective.

(c) XSens

That’s why some companies take the best of both worlds by combining an inertial tracker with an optical solution to continuously recalibrate the position (Intersense, Worldviz PPT, and yes, the Wiimote !)

Gloves

Data Gloves aren’t used that much, except when you really need to know the position of each fingers. Immersion’s Cyberglove and 5dt Glove seem to be the most common. A.R.T Fingertracking is a recent product with very precise positional data that works with their optical tracking system.

(c) S. Kuntz

(c) Immersion

Some current research are focusing on markerless tracking, which don’t require the user to put any specific apparatus.

Haptics, force feedback

The Inca 6D by Haption, based on the Spidar system, is the only large scale haptics device commercially available. The Haption’s devices compete with SensAble’s Phantom for desktop haptics. Immersion’s CyberGrasp exoskeleton gives force feedback to both your hand and your fingers.

The ART Fingertracking is the one of the few products that adds fingertips sensations, and more researches (CEA List, Laboratory for Intelligent Mechanical Systems) are being conducted to improve the range of available sensations

(c) Immersion

(c) S. Kuntz

The Magnetic Levitation Haptic Interface is ““levitated by magnets”. ”It offers things that other devices just can’t do – the high forces, low friction, low inertia, and six degrees of freedom.”

(c) CEA List

(c) LIMS

Locomotion

How do you walk inside a virtual environment ? This is still a major issue and some answers begin to appear.

The omni-directional treadmill, part of the Cyberwalk project, could be a near-ideal solution if it was affordable.

(c) Virtusphere

The VirtuSphere is already a commercial product and much more affordable (50-100 k$).

Some other research prototypes include the CirculaFloor with moving tiles, and the VR Shoes, both by the Tsukuba university.

(c) Tsukuba University

Tags: glove, haptics, inertial, Locomotion, magnetic, optical, reference, resources, tracking, VR Devices

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Happy new year ! Let it be full of happiness and success, virtual and real =)
Lately I’ve been reading  articles by some so-called journalists saying VR was one of the biggest technology flops in the last 20 years. If you’re reading this blog, you know they have missed a big part of hystory.

So I’ve decided to write a series of article about the state of VR, what can be done, what are the applications and the current hardware. Hopefully those ‘journalists’ will learn to do some research before writing such crappy articles.

VR is not yet mainstream, but it sure is already a success!

Read The state of Virtual Reality now.

The full article will probably be published on VResources when I’m done with it so that the community can improve on it.

Tags: VR Applications, VR Devices, VR Displays

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The Max Planck Institute, along with other german and italian institutions, is running a program called Cyberwalk which was first demonstrated in April 2007.
Their flyer explains it all :

The Goal
Un-constrained, quasi-natural omni-directional walking in virtual worlds
The Approach

The CyberWalk project follows a holistic approach covering science, technology and application by integrating the necessary blend of cognitive understanding with high fidelity technological development, to end up with a fully immersive showcase.

The site also has a lot of technical information.

Last but not least, it seems David Carmein, who makes the Omni-Directionnal Treadmill is directly involved in the project [Update: he is not, see comments..]

Tags: DavidCarmein, Locomotion, maxplanckinstitute, OmniDirectionnal, treadmill, VR Devices

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Did you know that VR devices are represented in the USB HID norm ? More precisely in the Usage tables, page 43. This document describes all the usages that a USB device can represent, a sort of abstract devices list, like mouse, joystick…
The types for VR are : Belt, Body Suit, Flexor, Glove, Head Tracker, Head Mounted Display, Hand Tracker, Oculometer, Vest, Animatronic Device.

This documents dates back to 2001 and is obviously outdated.. I’m wondering if any software or hardware is implementing those ?

Tags: hid, Norm, usb, VR Devices

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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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A french lab, who published a paper at Siggraph 2007, is working on a impressive markerless tracking/modeling system, the GrImage Platform:

This architecture is designed for mixed reality applications requiring such dynamic models, tele-immersion for instance. (…)

The acquisition [is] based on standard firewire cameras; the computation, based on a distribution scheme over a cluster of PC and using a recent shape-from-silhouette algorithm which leads to optimally precise 3D models.

Tags: Augmented Reality, markerless, modelling, tracking, VR Devices

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I just returned from Weimar, Germany, attending the Immersive Projection Technologies/Eurographics Symposium on Virtual Environments.

This has been a really interesting event. I’ve met some very nice people and learned a lot of things!

I’ll try to speak about the conferences later. In the meantime here are some photos.
Here are three pieces of hardware that were presented here that I particularly enjoyed :

Intersense IS-1200 VisTracker

Which I already presented here.

A.R.T. FingerTracking with Tactile Feedback

A.R.T. was presenting a prototype of its FingerTracking with tactile feedback. Three little wires enclose your fingers and vibrate can vibrate with differente intensities. This allows to “feel” when you touch an object, and have more precision when manipulating objects, especially when you don’t have a stereo display.

Haption Virtuose 6D Desktop

A small professional and precise haptics device with 6DOF (position+orientation), already presented at Laval Virtual 2007 :

Tags: Conference, EGVE, glove, haptics, Haption, intersense, IPT, optical, Virtual Reality, VR Devices

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• InterSense MictroTrax announced : a new Wand ! (1)

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 :

Tags: Augmented Reality, inertial, intersense, optical, tracking, umpc, Virtools, VR Devices, VRPack

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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.

Tags: bci, Tech, VR Devices

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A new cool device for the Wii :

Tags: Game, VR Devices, Wii

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