3D Virtualization Edges Toward the Mainstream

Roland Piquepaille writes "With recent improvements in graphic cards and in powerful Linux-based PC clusters, virtual 3D prototypes are rapidly replacing actual physical prototypes in a wide range of industries, including early adopters such as aerospace or car companies. But now, software designers are also incorporating sound and tactile feedbacks to their Virtual Reality (VR) systems for real product development. In this long article, Desktop Engineering gives several examples of these new VR developments. But even if PC clusters and off-the-shelf graphic cards are cheap, a state-of-the-art VR facility such as an immersive CAVE can still cost more than one million dollars, because you need to build the viewing facility and buy expensive projection systems. However, costs are still decreasing and virtual prototyping is reaching the mainstream stage. This overview contains selected excepts and comments."

Comments

ROLAND PIQUEPAILLE

[TrumpetPower!]

Please, people, let's not feed him. We've got enough whores 'round here already.

Cheers,

b&

Re:ROLAND PIQUEPAILLE

[Tim C]

Initially at least, every single story he submitted consisted of a brief overview of the actual story, and a link to his blog. His blog contained a brief overview of the story, and a link to the actual story. Now, after months of complaints, he includes a link to the story in the slashdot summary too. If you google on his name, you'll find that he's made a career out of this; he consults on driving traffic to websites and blogs.

He is whoring for traffic for his blog, plain and simple. That would be fine, but his stories turn up here with such regularity that you could be forgiven for thinking that he works for slashdot. That would *also* be fine, but if it's the case, it really ought to be disclosed.

A lot of people consider his stories (especially in the past, before he linked to the real story instead of just his blog) to be glorified adverts. Understandably, the people who subscribe so they don't have to see ads are a little upset at that.

Finally, attached to every single story of his are a lot of posts complaining about him for the reasons above (amongst others), and yet the slashdot editors remain utterly silent on the matter. Sure, it's their site and we don't have to read it, but it would be nice to at least be acknowleged. No-one likes to feel ignored, especially paying subscribers (not that I am one, of course).

Re:ROLAND PIQUEPAILLE

[Fjornir]

Well, I sincerely thank you for the reply and the reasonable tone you took in giving it. In all honesty I'd expected a bunch of flames an no one actually adressing the point.

But... I just can't bring myself to care. I mean if there's some fellow who's making a buck submitting interesting and topical stories to slashdot... more power to him. Granted, instead of a slashdot user acount his name is linked to his website so I cannot readily tell if his previous submissions were worthwhile, but... This one at least was an interesting article, and except for the "I hate Roland" posts spawned an average lazy Sunday slashdot discussion.

Re:ROLAND PIQUEPAILLE

[demachina]

Here is a pretty good write up about why everyone hates Roland. He is basicly making a living by finding someone elses interesting article, submitting it to Slashdot and using it to generate ad revenue on his web site. He has improved lately since he actually links to the original article first and to his web site second. Used to be you were steered to his web site first I gather.

Haven't checked myself but the writeup indicates that EVERY article he was submitting to Slashdot was being accepted which is a near impossibility unless he is recieving somekind of preferential treatement from Slashdot or its parent company.

The worst case conspiracy theory is he is partnered with Slashdot, or its parent company, or he is sending a kickback from his ad revenues to Slashdot and they are in turn insuring every one of his submissions makes the front page.

The people have spoken. Roland must die

[Anonymous Coward]

Just look at the first 10 or so comments on this story. Slashdot readers clearly want him gone. Editors, LISTEN.

Wow...

[dhakbar]

Only 1 of the first 8 posts didn't have something negative to say about Piquepaille.

Why is that? Slashdot editors, take notice.

3D printers

[wormbin]

VR is cool but don't forget that you can get a similar rapid prototype benefit from 3D printers.

CaveUT

[El_Muerte_TDS]

I always liked CaveUT: http://www.planetjeff.net/ut/CaveUT.html
a CAVE system that uses the UnrealEngine (even UT2004)

Re:CaveUT

[jericho4.0]

Thank you! What a great way to enjoy $2,000,000 worth of hardware! I was starting to feel stupid for buying that thing.

The one thing I remember from graphics class

[antifoidulus]

Just make sure your VR has a low latency. If people in a VR world turn but the world does not turn fast enough, a lot of them will vomit.

Re:toys for the boys?

[Fjornir]

Best bang-for-buck I've seen for home VR is a pair of shutter glasses. Basically the way it works if you have an LCD in front of each eye -- and in software the system renders a left eye image, and the glasses blank out your right eye -- then vice versa (syncing is handled by hooking the glasses inline between your monitor and your video card). I have the VR Visualizers from http://www.vrex.com/ ) and they're pretty cool.

However: the DepthCharge plugin they have for viewing 3D content in a webpage Just Plain Sucks -- it doesn't keep state and remember what kind of glasses you have so you need to pick it again and again and again.

The best-viewing mode with these glasses is interlaced (in addition to left/right image pairs, the dongle will blank our alternate scan lines on your monitor improving the effect a lot). Unfortunately on my glasses this mode requires you to hold-down a button on the glasses-controller, so it sucks for gaming without duct tape.

Video cards and drivers that will put out stereo image-pairs are few and far between. Make sure your card will, or buy a card that will if you want to do any gaming. Game compatability is also an issue. Google will help here.

Eyestrain. 'nuff said.

It needs to be done in a completely dark room -- any light reflecting off of your monitor will tend to ruin the illusion of 3d.

Your screen needs to be resonably flat -- curved monitors distort the 3d image ruining the illusion.

Article - Roland Piquepaille

[Zakabog]

Here's a link to the article without supporting the whore, errr Roland Piquepaille

Re:toys for the boys?

[pmjordan]

A friend of mine has shutter glasses, and they really didn't do much for me when I tried them. The constant flickering - remember, you now only have half the refresh rate - gave me a headache, and the sense of depth was very weak.

I suggest that before buying shutter glasses, one should check these things. I know I'm very sensitive to flickering, anything below 85Hz is useless to me. In "real-world" seeing I don't work off the stereoscopic vision for depth perception, I expect that this causes the weak improvement. (You can test this easily by closing one eye for an extended period of time. Some people start "grabbing air", while others just carry on as normal)

~phil

Roland

[Lord_Dweomer]

This is a Roland article. Please do not help him generate ad revenue by visiting his site.

Re:toys for the boys?

[Fjornir]

phil,

Very valid points, all of them. It sucks that they didn't work for you, but for me -- the "did it" after a fair amount of tweaking. The pitch-black room was the thing that helped the most for me -- that reduced the sensation of flickering and increased the depth and rise a lot. I actually wish my glasses were full goggles because I think most of the flicker I experience now is because even when my eye is "blacked" I'm still seeing ambient light from the monitor.

Tweaking the refresh rate was very important in my experiments with these too -- the LCDs on the glasses do take time to change state so it's important to find the fastest rate that the glasses can sustain.

Question -- did the glasses you played with support the "blanking-every-other-scanline" feature? I was utterly unimpressed with mine until I found that sweetness.

And a note to everyone else: it seems that the site I mentioned has stopped selling in individual units. Although this is a sadness there are other companies.

And remember: I'm pulling for you. We're all in this together.

--Fjornir

mainstream is nice, but imagine the research!

[adriand]

This is partially a shameless plug, but there is also some incredible things we can do with VR in terms of social science/psychology research.

just image any research where you have to record video/audio and then hire a bunch of psych 1 students to encode what they see for analysis (which is EXREMELY BIASED). now with VR, we can just record the position/orientation of the subject and use statistical methods (i.e. SPSS+MatLab) to crunch numbers (completely unbiased). Where I work, we have come up with some exciting discoveries.

I don't want to write a book here, so check out http://vhil.stanford.edu/

"In this long article"

[tod_miller]

1383 words, by a freelance writer. Support her by reading her own work, not some abridged version. (don't click second link, it is just a traffic drive - if he wants to tell us what he thinks he can post a /. reply and click some /. ads)

Read article un-abridged (it is getting better, the real link was first in the story)

Guidelines for moderating sigs: If it is a sig that contains non-abusive content, ignore it. If the sig ISN'T actually a sig (cannot be turned off) then give it a -1 offtopic/over-rated/troll as applicable.

VR good for games, bad for business....

[MosesJones]

I worked in an industry that used VR, you can probably guess which one if I say its not for entertainment. What we found was that for simulation elements and "gaming" it worked well, but for command and control type functions it was too much information to process and a flat 2D model worked better, the 3D model lead to things being missed as they were out of scope and also on periferal vision elements being given too much weight over the central image (the human eye reacts better to movement at the edges, its where the tigers are coming from).

So great that its getting cheaper, but please god can all those "cool a VR desktop" people just have a think for a second. Maybe zoom out (ala the Mac and Looking Glass) to get your windows, or rotate (looking glass) but a full VR would be dreadful, we found users getting lost and disoriented as they tried to navigate unstructured information (and most people's directory structures are very unstructured).

Early Adopter Outlook

[Chitlenz]

As the lead developer on a PACS system (this involves capture images for radiological diagnostics) we have been working to evolve a lot of these technologies and adapt them more towards desktop use. MRI in particular captures image data with volumetric depth and allows for relatively easy conversion to 3d volumetric models. Add some basic surface analysis and you get texture modelling of 3d surfaces in realtime, for instance Terarecon's Aquarius stations (http://www.terarecon.com) have the capability to use live data captured from a patient still in an MRI bore to allow the extraction of live models (as in watch your heart beat), and future versions will be able to 'live-simulate' heart attacks, etc. Terarecon is a competitor of ours, but their site has some cool examples =)

For us, VR is an inevitablity, but CAVE environments are impractical. Today, we use high end (5MP) flat panels to lay out diagnostic workstations in something similar to the 'Minority Report' layout, minus the panel transparency. This guy (article author) is looking at VR applications essentially in researched industrial design, which is cool and all, but what's important to note is that in order for someone other than a labrat to be comfortable with the environment it has to become a lot more comfortable to the average guy. That is, VR needs to emulate life a lot better than it does today in its interfaces. Convincing a non-techie to put on ANYTHING (glove, helmet,etc.) ain't gonna happen for a workspace that will be used 12 hours a day by one person. The important thing missing still is ergonomics and practicality.

The cool thing though, is that TRUE VR is very close to reality today, that is to say that we can very accurately (to the mm, soon to be to the micron) recreate a simulated space within you today, and use that data to effectively represent you on a computer. Its actually kinda creepy since when you texture a skull study it really looks like the person you scanned heh. I keep meaning to scan me and turn me into a Doom3 model (muahahaha).

Anyway, good article, but not so relevant to the real world just yet IMHO. The best hope for entertainment VR is indeed still the CAVE systems. I dunno where they got 400k from, I can build a cave for around 20k, including everything. Maybe they included the cost of the building too or something.

Just my 2cents -- chitlenz

Re:The people have spoken. Roland must die

[drsquare]

Don't speak for us please. I am what would be called the 'silent majority', and after reading up on him, I hate this 'Roland' person too.

Also, slashdot and other 'blog'-type sites say they want to be taken as serious journalists like newspapers. In which case, newspapers have 'advertisement' above adverts, especially ones which are of the same format as normal articles, so slashdot should do the same for stories like this. If you want to be considered the same as the professionals then act accordingly. Yes, this also goes for the picture-adverts above the comments.