{"id":253,"date":"2006-10-11T14:29:59","date_gmt":"2006-10-11T14:29:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cb.nowan.net\/wblog\/?p=253"},"modified":"2009-10-13T14:01:19","modified_gmt":"2009-10-13T13:01:19","slug":"sensics-pisight-first-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/cb.nowan.net\/blog\/2006\/10\/11\/sensics-pisight-first-review\/","title":{"rendered":"Sensics piSight : first review"},"content":{"rendered":"[Update: This was written 3 years ago, the product is now much better, lighter and easy to use!]\n<p>I&#8217;ve had the chance to test the famous Sensics piSight yesterday. I could only test it for 5 mins, and I think more time would be needed for a better review. Particularly, I&#8217;d like to have more time to <a href=\"http:\/\/sensics.com\/news_pr_08_22_2006.html\">compare it with a CAVE<\/a>. Anyway, here&#8217;s what I have to say for the moment. I&#8217;ll try to compare it to other HMDs and CAVEs.<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/sensics.com\/images\/products\/main_products_page.jpg\" \/><\/p>\n<p>The piSight is a panoramic HMD, involving 12 (4&#215;3) 800&#215;600 LCDs per eye. So it&#8217;s 24 LCDs you have to feed. You can find detailed specifications <a href=\"http:\/\/sensics.com\/products.html\">here<\/a>. It was running Virtools VRPack demos.<\/p>\n<p>&lt;insert here legal rant about how these are my own personnal opinions and not my employer&#8217;s etc..&gt;<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/cb.nowan.net\/images\/sensics_cb.jpg\" \/><\/p>\n<p>&#8211; Here&#8217;s how I look with it &#8211;<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/cb.nowan.net\/images\/sensics_global.jpg\" \/><\/p>\n<p>&#8211; The global design &#8211;<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/cb.nowan.net\/images\/sensics_closeup.jpg\" \/><\/p>\n<p>&#8211; You can see the different lenses here &#8211;<\/p>\n<p>On the plus side :<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>It&#8217;s cheaper and much more transportable than a CAVE. (Note that the SASCube was designed with portability in mind, but you still need one full day to set it up.)<\/li>\n<li>Compared to other HMDs it&#8217;s really panoramic, and that makes a great difference! Much higher resolution too. Higher resolution per degree compared to a CAVE.<\/li>\n<li>The overlap is good, so you have a good stereoscopic vision.<\/li>\n<li>It&#8217;s light, 1kg<\/li>\n<li>I wasn&#8217;t ill in it, and I&#8217;m very sensible to simulators sickness.<\/li>\n<li>Compared to a CAVE, you have much more liberty of movement (provided that you have a long enough cable and tracking coverage)<\/li>\n<li>You can buy a HMD with more or less LCDs displays. And if one day you want more, you can easily upgrade, just send it back to Sensics and they&#8217;ll send it back to you upgraded.<\/li>\n<li>Good integration in Virtools VRPack.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>On the negative side :<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Calibration : compared to a CAVE where you simply have to wear the shutter glasses, the calibration phase is cumbersome and needs adjustments for each user. And if it&#8217;s not perfect, you&#8217;ll have artifacts (lenses\/displays seams, blur) that really prevent a good immersion. Moreover, you&#8217;re not sure when it&#8217;s good. You nearly don&#8217;t see the seams anymore, but you&#8217;re still trying to have a better position. They should have a calibration world, maybe with lines that should be sharp and aligned. Anyway, the calibration phase should really be improved.<\/li>\n<li>There was dust on several parts of the displays<\/li>\n<li>The head attachment was a bit loose for me, so when I moved my head, the HMD didn&#8217;t exactly follow my head, so the calibration was wrong. I saw the seams and I had to move the HMD back to a good position. I know some people managed to get it tight.<\/li>\n<li>The lenses are calibrated to work when you look straight ahead, so when you roll your eyes to see on the sides, you start seeing the seams and lose immersion.<\/li>\n<li>Even with what I thought was a good calibration, I saw differences between displays of one given eye, as if one lens was not totally identical to the others. That disturbed me and at some point I couldn&#8217;t see anything but this. But maybe I was too concentrated on trying to find the weaknesses of the display =)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>So what&#8217;s the conclusion? The panoramic view is really interesting, but the calibration is too imprecise and the slightest movement of the HMD from your head can untune the settings. It didn&#8217;t impress me as much as a CAVE or a SASCube. They are still my favorites. This is a gut feeling, not a reasonned one =) I&#8217;m in love with CAVEs lol. There are lots of applications when you would use such a HMD. For example I know some scientists are working on movement ancticipation and need the user to physically walk for several meters. This is not possible in a CAVE where most of the movements are made with a joystick. But given an unlimited budget\/room space and no good reason to favor a HMD, I&#8217;d still use a CAVE.<\/p>\n<p>But as Philippe David once stated in a presentation, and I tend to agree with him, HMDs are the way to go. Or direct <a href=\"http:\/\/www.cs.nps.navy.mil\/people\/faculty\/capps\/4473\/projects\/fiambolis\/vrd\/vrd_full.html\">retinal display<\/a>, or hack the optical nerve or whatever. CAVEs are just a hack while waiting for this to come. But there&#8217;s still a lot of work to get a perfect HMD, whereas I&#8217;m completely in love with the immersion in CAVEs right now.<\/p>\n<p>So we need companies like Sensics to push the HMD forward! Moreover they&#8217;re thinking about having mass market HMDs one day! In the meantime I hope they&#8217;ll get a better calibration procedure and that they&#8217;ll resolve their small optics side-effects. Maybe by using <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Oled\">OLED displays<\/a> they could get rid of the all the lenses and make only one big curved display? Dream on, dream on, &#8217;til your dreams come true =)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>[Update: This was written 3 years ago, the product is now much better, lighter and easy to use!] I&#8217;ve had the chance to test the famous Sensics piSight yesterday. I could only test it for 5 mins, and&#8230; <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20,17],"tags":[214,236,74,472,44,73,211,206,209],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/cb.nowan.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/253"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/cb.nowan.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/cb.nowan.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/cb.nowan.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/cb.nowan.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=253"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/cb.nowan.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/253\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":784,"href":"http:\/\/cb.nowan.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/253\/revisions\/784"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/cb.nowan.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=253"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/cb.nowan.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=253"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/cb.nowan.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=253"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}