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Virtual Sword Fighting
Faeton writes "SIGGRAPH is on, and Extremetech has the scoop on it. From Nvidia's N30 to ATI's monster 4x Radeon 9700 render board, the coolest thing was the virtual sword fighting simulator. With a VR headset and a gyroscopic force-feedback "sword", you could really be the badass knight you've always dreamed of. I want this at a local arcade soon!"
I think most of the slashdot community would use this be Jedi Knights.
WWJD.... for a Klondike bar?
Why does the display rotate? Why couldn't it just be 30 stationary displays? It would seem stationary displays would be a lot easier to create and maybe even synchornize. Also, less moving parts would help durability. Anyone have any info on this, or has anyone seen it live at Siggraph?
WWJD.... for a Klondike bar?
And became interested in swords, and fencing. In college, there was a fencing class, so a friend I took it. After a while, we considered buying our own swords. Eventually, we decided not to, because odds were that eventually, we'd want to play with them, and one of us would end up badly injured or dead. I think we made the right choice.
2) Any mention in reference to the "vibrating stick".
3) Any polls that mention prOn or "vibrating stick" with a CmdrTaco last-choice.
4) Creating any troll-ific "Please refain from" lists.
I have to contend with sword-fights at all the local bars... now I get to do the same on my computer.
*twirls finger in air*
my religion lies somewhere between buddhism and super monkey ball - pamphlet?
It seems like VR stuff has advanced very slowly in the past few years - except the graphics part of it. We are now getting to the point with the new cards from ATi and Nvidia that movies can be rendered real time so the visual experience is great, but physically its still cumbersome. Why isn't the equipment wireless, using bluetooth or something similar for everything to communicate. Its not going to feel very realistic to me if I have a strand of wires attached to me. I think the VR industry needs to step back and worry less about pretty graphics and more about making the hardware more user friendly to help add to the experience.
-
aphex
I Steal Music!
Aside from the fact that you have to a) leave yer basement and b) take some bruises. :p
I think bruises would be the least of one's concerns in swordfighting...
WWJD.... for a Klondike bar?
I've posted this idea to various bulletin boards many many times in the past few years, about time somebody listens to me. :-D
:)
(My idea was using off the shelf equipment though, and the controller had an estimated price of ~$90-$120, and was wireless to boot. No forcefeed back obviously, heh, would've required tons of batteries for that.
Need help treating your acne? Come here!
SIGGRAPH exhibits closed on Thursday evening, but here are some of the biggest highlights:
SGI annouced their Infinite Reality 4 option for the Onyx series... comes standard with 1gbyte of texture ram and 2.5gbyte of buffer, expandable to 10gbyte of buffer for a total of 11gbyte of onboard gfx ram. Up to 16 IR4 subsystems can be installed in a single machine. Each subsystem can drive up to 8 monitors... or all subsystems can run in parallel for greater performance. The Virtual LA Urban Simulation project demoed part of their 3D LA using IR4 and the older IR3. They currently have over 1TB of texture and geometry data from Los Angeles, mostly in downtown areas... though they have 20,000 square miles mapped out, 4,000 of which are quite detailed.
Sun was showing off their XVR-4000 gfx option, a cardset that uses the IPA slot found in most Ultra-series machines. It has about 8x the geometry performance of IR3 and about 50% of the fill performance of IR4... for a fraction of the cost. 1gbyte of texture and 144mbyte of buffer. Different market targets, but interesting none the less.
What? What did you expect to follow "insert"? Get your mind out of the gutter. :)
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
Why isn't the equipment wireless, using bluetooth or something similar for everything to communicate. Its not going to feel very realistic to me if I have a strand of wires attached to me.
SGI was showing off some examples of what you are describing. Basicly, the big iron (clusters, or large machines such as Onyxes) sit in the machine room, while the users have wireless webpads and such elsewhere. It's the only way we can currently tap the power of thousands of processors and dozens of 3D accelerators in a handheld using current technology.
http://www.sgi.com/visualization/van/
Don't be too depressed if the first home versions are somewhat crude... remember, you have to start somewhere...
The Telstar Ranger wasn't exactly Quake.
I've always wanted to learn kendo, but the nearest club from my university, is, alas, 50 miles away. And I don't have a car.
:p
Would be nice to know that in the future one could just don a VR headset and practice any sort of exotic martial arts
Probably safer for getting initiated into using sharp weapons as well..
Nice,
Michel
Michel
Fedora Project Contribut
I think bruises would be the least of one's concerns in swordfighting...
Not really. The science of armor advanced to the point where it was quite equal to the sword, and an opponent has to work pretty darn hard to actually hurt someone wearing it.
I understand the SCA has quite a good safety record, considering they have guys in armor swinging swords at each other as a recreational activity.
Oh, and then there are *training swords* that don't have the sharp edges. And boffers. (toy "swords" made from some things easily obtainable at a hardware shop, that are far less effective than a fist when it comes to hurting someone.)
I want this at a local arcade soon!
This might be slightly off-topic, but it has to be remembered that since the 80s, arcades have REALLY had tough times.
Back in the 70s and 80s, the cost of the best games and technology was prohibitively high, so arcades did good business. Since the mid 90s (pretty much since PlayStation), however, you can buy something just as powerful as an arcade machine for home use and you don't need to go to the arcade at all.
I am somewhat saddened by the 'fall' of the arcade, and think they add a great social aspect to gaming. Imagine modern day arcades with 16 player Quake 3 style shoot-em-ups.. but it ain't going to happen for most arcades. Most arcades these days still have their crappy early 90s games (Test Drive, Sega Rally, etc) along with a bunch of lame shooting games.
Arcades are for tourists nowadays, not serious gamers. And that is sad.
mogorific carpentry experiments
Armed with my foam sword, and utterly unable to use it, I cheerfully bumbled about with the rest of 'em, swishing the odd swish and generally having a good time.
Until I came up against Nick.
Now Nick is an interesting person. He has reactions like no-one else I've ever played against in anything. To give an idea, I had never been defeated in air-hockey by anyone I played (and I played a lot) until I played Nick. And Nick I never beat even once...
Back onto the role-playing session, and in my wanderings I ran into Nick, who was holding two rather better constructed foam swords. Turning to me, he did some ridiculously cool flick with both hands - crossing swords whilst swinging them, like you see in the old pirate films - and began his advance.
Role-playing to the hilt, I briefly considered. "What would my character do in this situation? Would he a) buckle his swash and fight like a man or b) flee like the cringing curr he really is?".
I ran like hell...
Cheers,
Ian
You can play this virtual sword-fighting game at Walt Disney World's Disney Quest area in the part of the park called Downtown Disney. It's pretty fun, and a good value, since you pay around $15 and get to play unlimited arcade games, pinball, and weird cool things like the sword fight. I don't think you need admission to the park, either. You could just do this if you wanted. I got sort of bored of the sword fight once I did it once. The gyroscopic sword is a really cool way of simulating an actual sword though. It's sort of funny to see 10 people wearing headsets and waving these handles around! There's also this incredibly cool thing at Disney Quest where you make your own rollercoaster and ride it. How that works is you lay out the track, then once you get all that good to go, the track is rated based on how severe it is. The attendant told me that if you're only going on it once, make it as severe as possible. Then you get into this rotating cabin that can spin a full 360 degrees in any direction. You look into this screen that takes up your entire view and the combination of the spinning, the video, and the fact that you have no idea which way is up makes your body feel like it's actually on a rollercoaster. It's a better feeling than a real rollercoaster, people have gotten sick on it. Amazing.
There are actually groups that do this frequently. There is the origional, Dagorhir, The rescent spin-off called Belegrath MCS, and if you want more role-playing, Amtgard. I've never participated in Amtgard, but I have in Dagorhir and Belegarth, and while the concept of dressing up in medeval clothing and fighting with foam swords and sheilds on central campus seems strange to some people, it it actually a lot of fun, and it's completly safe...doing it several hours a week for a year, the worst injury I ever sustained was a bloody nose.
The article text is:
One of the more amusing displays was this sword-fighting simulator that used a VR headset along with a "virtual sword" that had two gyro motors running it that allowed for tactile force feedback. Apparently, one overly exuberant combatant in a moment of pique jumped up to deliver the death-blow, and upon landing smashed the sword into one of the posts you see in this picture, leaving it in pieces, and the device's creators nearly in tears. But, they were able to put Humpty Dumpty back together again, and the virtual combat raged on. This system also used multi-channel audio to help the player localize sounds and better immerse them in the scene, and also used video compositing to put an image of that particular player into the rendered 3D scene.
If this became a home entertainment unit, can you imagine the sort of waiver the company would want the average geek to sign before using it?
"The undersigned (hereafter, "they") agrees that Swashing Buckles Incorporated (hereafter, "we") were just sitting around innocently when the undersigned came in and DEMANDED to be given one of these virtual sword units, despite the fact that we warned them OVER and OVER that they hadn't done anything more strenuous than click a mouse in TEN YEARS, and therefore would ALMOST CERTAINLY strain EVERY MUSCLE IN THEIR BODY within minutes of engaging in a virtual battle. The undersigned further agrees that we warned them that they would QUITE LIKELY destroy a valued POSSESSION, PET, or LOVED ONE, while leaping about blindly inside the virtual reality helmet. The undersigned agrees NOT TO COME CRYING TO US when these things happen."
Thought some people might be interested that there's an (admittedly less sophisticated) sword fighting game from Konami out in arcades which uses a motion-sensor sword controller. It's called Tsurugi (apparently Blade of Honor is the US). Here's some pics and information from the Magic Box.
user interface just got a lot easier than:
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If voting were effective, it would be illegal by now.
This wasnt even close to the coolest thing at SIGGRAPH! Takeo Igarashi's work on predictive interfacing making easier 2d and 3d drawing tools was cooler. Digiplasty , a kind of 3d exquisite corpse as shown by Stewart and Makai was cooler. (For that matter the Studio, manned by Makai, Stewart, Scott and many others, where you could create 2d and 3d art and print 2d and 3d was AWESOME - you could work in there for hours, vs. the few seconds of playing with a silly virtual sword.) Scotts Dodecahedron was a wonderful example of taking something abstract and virtual and making it real and usable. Isa's overview of wearable tech and cyberfashion (she took out the notes, dammit!) was refreshing, if not so new to a frequent slashdotter. (She's a burner too!) Some of the mixed reality work being done at the University of Singapore was really neat. (This is an example of some of the most exciting stuff there. Several researchers showed some great work being done in augmented reality, and combining that with some of the reasonable priced wearable and wirelessable computing, we can see some real headway being made. One researcher even composites a virtual face back onto a fellow participant in the augemented reality environment, masking the HMD, even going so far as to track the eyes and simulate the gaze.) The results of last years meditation chamber research installation was an interesting and possibly VERY useful application of VR technology. W. Bradford Paley's work on applying alternative interfaces to explore other media was fascinating, where you can use this LARGE java tool named TextArc to examine graphically over 400 literary works. The Web3D Consortium's release of the final working draft of X3D (with tools) could end up being much more important than the newest video card from ATI. Dietmar Offenhuber's work on non-isotropic spaces at wegzeit was an interesting approach to mapping and representing real places. Zachary Simpson et al's delightfully simple shadow interactivity was many times more fun than the virtual swordfight. Fabric.ch's knowscape was also exciting, both for the viewers and the presenter, as he would find additions from his European counterparts each morning when he logged on to the shared 3d space. Kenneth Huff's beautiful art using maya was just one example of some wonderful digital work being done. Lastly, Michael J. Lyons soon-to-be-published research on the aesthetics of Tokyo's Kyoto Gardens was both informative and inspiring. And this is just a TINY PART of what happened there!
Really, SIGGRAPH was NOT just an exhibition floor with cheesey swag (although the little green LED lights were very nice) and some cool new toys. It was presentation after presentation by resesarchers, some barely able to speak engrish, but all excited about their work and open to collaboration. It was hours and hours of animation, some (Like Allain Escalle's "Le Conte du monde flottant") were so stunning as to make you forget where animation ended and life began. Disney's work on replacing one actors face with another, retaining ALL facial expression, was downright scary. And the Spiderman gag footage, his spidey-suit oddly replaced with a fully reflective silver surface, like most of the rest of SIGGRAPH'S less entertaining presentations, were surely an indication of things to come.
Take the time to go to SIGGRAPH2002 and look around. If you find something interesting, write the author. This is where the new VR and AR comes from - not ATI!
If you want to see a video with the Virtual Chanbara (sword fighting) in action, to to this SIGGRAPH Emerging Technologies page. Actually, a coworker of mine is a committee member. Lucky bastard.
Click on the video stream towards the top of the page for audio visual enjoyment (which includes the virtual sword fighting and much more). I *so* wish I was there.
A very Quick Summary of the Virtual Chanbara is also available. Trust me. The video does a much better job.
I was cruising at +3 almost 4 hours after the story hit, and hadn't seen a Hiro Protagonist reference. I was about to add one, but first I dropped Score back and found this one, with no mod points. Has /. lost its core literacy?
Perhaps a better question, does/should Neal Stephenson constitute core literacy for a Geek crowd?
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
I just spent 4 hours makeing armor adjustmers on a friends suit so we can go to practice tomorrow. I can say with some confedenect that there is a lot more to sword fighting than swinging a stick. I would incorage anyone that wants to learn to take a class or find there local fencing club or find there local SCA practice. There is something to be saI just spent 4 hours making armor adjusters on a friends suit so we can go to practice tomorrow. I can say that there is a lot more to sword fighting than swinging a stick. I would encourage anyone that wants to learn to take a class, find there local fencing club, or find there local SCA practice. There is so much more when you do it for real, I jest don't think there will ever be enough polygons.
Charles Puffer
know in the SCA as
Lord Duncan Forbes Squire to his Grace Brion Tarragon
As far as the graphics are concerned, we're back to VirtaFighter 1. If high poly high texture models are your thing, this wont interest you. But,the graphics didn't worry me as much as the animation. I counted about 5 different cycles of animation from the enemy, which include predicable routines of slicing vertically, horizontly, the spinning cyclone of um, death, and the backward leap. Your enemy is no samuri. :)
I also found it intesting that everyone who played won. It was that easy. I long for realistic, fun vr experiences, but this was hardly much of a step forward.
Kendo requires that you look directly into your opponents eyes.
And nowhere else.
You must see every little contraction of his iris, every slight flick of eyelid.
Lose concentration for one thousandth of a second and the next thing you know your head has been split in two.
No VR system is gonna allow you to do that.
Great sport anyway.
If you don't want to repeat the past, stop living in it.
Might have scored better if not for the blatant mispelling. "Hiro Protanonist" just doesn't have the same ring to it.
14 digits of Pi are all we need.
For the most part, in the SCA, heavy weapons combat is done with rattan sticks wrapped in duct tape, made to look like swords. Here are the armored combat rules. If you look at weapons standards, you'll see what I'm talking about.
Disclaimer: I am not a marshal, nor am I a stickjock. I'm just going to pennsic for the beer.
The previous has been a secret message to my comrades.
My 11 year old son and I tried this exhibit at the 'Emerging Technologies' section of SigGraph.
The headset doesn't fit well and moves around all the time. This would be OK for the usual sitting in a chair looking around" kind of VR, but when you are jumping around and spinning to see where he bad guys are coming from - it's hopeless.
Your field of view is *WAY* to narrow for fighting.
The graphics were very 1995 - it looked like they were almost an afterthought. Hardly any texture, plain green floor, crude enemy animation with red triangles for blood splotches and yellow triangles for sparks when the swords hit.
The spatialised audio didn't help in locating your enemies. People watching the show were forever shouting "He's Behing You!!" to players who couldn't see that they were being chopped to bits by enemies they couldn't see. The narrow field of view wasn't helping any.
The fancy "force feedback" sword was about as effective as a Nintendo 64 rumble-pack in conveying that you had or hadn't hit something - but that was about it.
It was a brave effort - and fun for a short time, but definitely *NOT* earth-shattering VR.
www.sjbaker.org
Does it make those WNNNG! WNNNG! SKKKSH! noises lightsabers do?
;)
If so, soon we'll see the likes of Darth Hemos and
Padewan CowboyNeal
[o]_O
The Virtual LA Urban Simulation project [ucla.edu] demoed part of their 3D LA using IR4 and the older IR3. They currently have over 1TB of texture and geometry data from Los Angeles, mostly in downtown areas... though they have 20,000 square miles mapped out, 4,000 of which are quite detailed.
Imagine an add-on to the America's Army game - urban warfare, utilizing maps and geometry from the UCLA project. I'm surprised that they're getting funding from NSF only (that's all I saw on the site.) I would have expected at least some DoD or Navy funding given the potential applications for VR training and research (ie, into AI and simulations in an urban environment
*bop* dead ;)
Probably the best option for Slashdot geeks is not fencing, or SCA, but boffs: lightest-touch foam weapons combat. SCA demands a hell of a lot of committment to do serious combat- you will break fingers and such, this is bad for most geeks. Fencing demands more discipline and is as formalized as chess, sort of dignified. Boffs, your main rules are (IMHO) 'get hit, you lose it' (as in arms, legs) and 'no face shots', for obvious reasons. Some systems like the one I played allow top-of-head-bops, an amazingly swift and deadly attack but prone to face shots if tried by newbies.
Fighting in boffs, you move in to the strike zone of your opponent (reach and sword length matter- but a great fighter with a 'dagger' can take out a poor fighter with a 'hand and a half'). You will probably use a fencing-like pose with extended leg and sword-tip up above your head. That means you can duck your leg up rapidly if it's swung at, and you can form a sort of umbrella with your sword, deflecting blows. If your sword tip is way over to the side, you're wide open, you probably can't bring it back in time to deflect a blow.
My favorite boffs move is one my brother Steve taught me- don't know if he invented it. You slash fiercely out to the side of your opponent's head, forcing them to block to that direction (if you're right handed it'll be to the right of them as you see it). Before their block can hit, you whip your sword around really fast, over your head, all from the wrist, and 'catch' it just as it's going to slam into them from the other side, so it just lightly bops them. Fast and spectacular move that's safe and effective- you're never thrusting directly at the person, and when the whirling sword reaches them, your arm's in a position to pull the blow very effectively, sparing them a Louisville Slugger whack (and those are against the rules anyway).
What can I say- it's a cool sport :)
I saw something like this in an arcade in Las Vegas on the strip. You were instructed to stand in a circle facing a big screen TV, where Virtua Fighter was being played. The controls were really simple. Cameras detected movements forward and backward, jups, kicks, and punches. You had to hold your arm or leg out for a bit longer than normal to register, but it worked pretty well. I'm very out of shape, so was winded after the game... and then I found DDR for the first time. *whine*
Whoever stated that signature sizes should be limited to one hundred and twenty characters can just go ahead and kiss my
The sad thing is, I did correct the spelling... Apparently I deleted the "g" at the same time as fixing my other botched spelling. *Sigh* Proving once again that previewing doesn't guarantee anything. :(
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
Word on the street says IP isn't even close to the raw performance that Bali would have had....
That's because InfinitePerformance is Odyssey, not Bali. Odyssey is the same one-chip graphics technology used in the Octane2 and the Fuel. (As I'm sure you know; that's just for the less-informed readers out there.) Incidentally, Odyssey is cool. Pull out the board and look at it. What do you see? One chip, about three inches square, with a giant heat sink on it. That's the graphics system. Cool.
I was never in the loop, per se, on Bali, but I did work, at the time, for what was supposed to be one of SGI's big Bali customers. My former company built flight sims, and they were bidding on a project for the US DoD to build the next-generation F-16 trainer. The system was prototyped using a big multipipe IR system (seven racks, just for the IG!), but it was to go into production on Bali.
Long story short, Rayt^W my former employer lost the contract to Lockheed, so all of those pre-orders for Onyx3s with Bali disappeared. I'm sure if that customer hadn't bailed, SGI wouldn't have been so quick to can the Bali project.
I agree with you that desktop graphics have come along way, but I think SGI still has the lead in terms of ability to render a quality visual scene in real time. Pure geometry performance is important, but since the poly count is fairly low in real-time sims anyway, texture and fill performance-- and high-speed texture cache size-- are even more important, and SGI wins those contests hands down.
There are several ways to make swordfighting safe for practice purposes. You can use real swords, blunted, and avoid swinging for the head (Empire of Chivalry and Steel does this). You can use foam swords of various degrees of hardness, and then armor is almost unnecessary. You can use a wooden sword with padding on it (like the Historical Armored Combat Association), and light armor. Or, as in the SCA, you use hard wooden swords, and heavy metal and / or plastic armor.
None of these systems can accurately reproduce all the nuances of real to-the-death sword combat.
For safety reasons, live steel is out. Foam swords are far too light; you wind up moving them in ways that real swords simply don't. SCA swords bounce off armor exactly wrong, and they tend to be round, making it hard to tell when you are throwing flat (the aerodynamics of a real broadsword make this obvious), and SCA rules prohibit shots below the knee. The padded wood swords that HACA uses feel right and swing right, and with heavy armor you can even play full-speed, full-force (HACA members often say they can go full-speed and pull your shots, which just demonstrates that they are used to going slow, I think).
The HACA system would be the best combination of safety and accuracy, but it is not popular enough to have the critical mass of players needed for advancement of the style. Last I checked, it was still low-speed cut-and-thrust stuff straight from the books, and a giant chip on their collective shoulder about it.
The inherent problem with the HACA system is that, like all these, the sword doesn't cut, and that matters. Take the Viking Holmgang style - three light center-boss round shields per combatant, and the sagas tell us it was quite common for blows to cut through the shield, and the leg beyond it. Therefore, correct use of a light Holmgang round shield would be to block with the boss, and probably try to bind your opponent's blade in the wood of your shield. This can only be done with a sharp sword. QED, no system of swordplay can be both safe and accurate.
-- Jeff Paulsen
Foam weapons would have been good in that situation, even though the few rare combats were actually run by dice rolls and cards. I think anytime adults play at fighting and heavy objects are involved there should be either protective gear or a lot of empty space sepating the business end of the blunt object and the target (eg. virtual fighting on opposite sides of the room).
As a kid I used to thump at other kids with a six foot wooden staff (the nature of monkey was irrepressible), but that usually involved hitting at the other kids staff or lots of slow motion theatrical stuff. If a kid with a blunt object loses it people are less likely to get hurt than if an adult loses it.
With something like this setup and two people in the same room with virtual headsets I can forsee someone beating the guy in marketing to a bloody pulp with the gyroscopicly stablised VR sword during what would start as a friendly game. Keep it virtual, stay in your corner.
And for even more info, check out WMAW. www.wmaw.org, which is the gathering of Western Martial Arts enthusiasts/students in Chicago this year (New York and Toronto previously).
The work they do varies from dagger, wrestling, longsword, side sword, rapier, small sword, sticks and other types of fighting. These are the people doing the most realistic work in Renaissance and Medieval fighting these days. The only way to get things any more realistic is to use sharpened blades, and heck, there was a demo at WMAW 2001 with a modern German sabre fighting, where they actually DO use sharpened blades.
This is, indeed, the 'real deal'.
j
-- There is no sig line, only Zuul.
How typical! Royalty from a pricipality of the MIDDLE posting as an Anonymous Coward! No wonder Midrealm lost last year, as I'm sure you will lose THIS year!
The previous has been a secret message to my comrades.