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How To Build a Winscape
hoagaboom writes "You take your plasma TVs, mix them with a healthy dose of OpenGL and a dash of Wii Remote. Bake for a year and enjoy something called a Winscape." Although I'm not sure I'm quite willing to wear a special necklace to make the effect work, it's a super sweet little project, although they want $10 for the software and then $10 for many of the actual video loops.
The thing is, it still wouldn't look 3D, even if it had head tracking. It would be quite a weird effect for you to move and be able to look around but it would still be flat.
Now my bomb shelter will be perfect
..let me say that the baby in the video is really cute. Not as cute as my baby boy, but still, not trailing far behind.
Way more fun than a techie gadget such as fake windows.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
Well, nothing is stopping you from making your own if you want to save $20, after spending several thousand on the hardware. Actually I suppose you could just engineer your own plasma screens too. Screw you patents! Stick it to the man!
$20 total and you're bitching about it? Seriously. STFU & GTFO. If you think that "Free" software means "No money" then you're doing it wrong.
Why on earth are you whining about a $20 price? People spend plenty more on screensavers.
Totally worth it, and negligible when considering the cost of the rest of the hardware.
I expect that an improvement can be done with webcam tracking, obviously for one viewer at a time.
Really.
Use something like EyeToy or Natal to track the user.
Now I have something else I MUST have that I didn't even know about before, damn you slashdot!
CS: It is all sink or swim...oh and did I mention there are sharks in that water?
Now you can leave your mom's basement, without ever leaving your mom's basement.
Beauty is in the eye of the beerholder.
If they track the location they could make it 3D, too. Well at least in theory.
Whining about the $20 is like complaining the gas for your new Ferrari is too expensive. Sure though, it's a valid excuse not to buy it!
My two cents.
If they get rid of that horrific looking necklace and use camera based person tracking the whole thing would be a lot more feasible. You can't honestly tell me that having to walk around your house with an IR emitter (guessing that's what it is based on the WiiMote) round your neck is a great prospect?
You can advertise in this sig from as little as £99.99 a month!
I mean, do you rent it? Adopt it? Make your own? - which means getting a woman...
Nah, this is just waaaayyy too difficult!
RIP America
July 4, 1776 - September 11, 2001
It would be fine for one person, but the perspective will only be for the person wearing the dorky necklace. It will be wierd and jarring for anyone else. "Waking up in the same place is boring" but more boring would be putting the thing on before you perk your coffee. Even putting on glasses was a pain in the ass thirty years after I started wearing them at age six, and they were totally necessary; I was blind without them. Nobody is going to get up and put that thing on first thing in the morning, especially after the novelty wears off.
Also, prior art -- Total Recall
Free Martian Whores!
This concept has been discussed in several video forums. Turning your HDTV into a window to somewhere else. Along with fish tanks, fire places and other perspective shots.
But this goes way beyond those simple ideas. The perspective tracker is very clever, but that and building it into the wall adds cost and complexity. I think a simple screen saver type loop would be good enough for most people. Just to keep your TV from being a big, black hole in your living room.
Still, good work packaging a simple idea into something that has potential as a commercial product.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
$10,000 for hardware and other aspects.
sorry, not worth it. Neat, but until I wipe my bum with $100.00 bills I'ts not worth it.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I think it’s more that it costs $2000-$3000 to begin with and then they nickel-and-dime you on the software and video loops.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
In Holland we have a saying; Better well-stolen than poorly made up. In this case, this guy beat them to the idea, but these guys made a better looking use for it; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jd3-eiid-Uw
Because it can only work from one point of view at a time, it's going to fail badly if there is more than one person in the room. The one wearing the necklace gets the full 3D experience - the others wonder why the image is so skewed and distorted all the time.
Well this is all fine and dandy.... but: http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/12/23/1359259
been there, done that.
Straight from TFA...
So yeah. Apparently most of the time you’d want to just have it sit there displaying its static image or video loop but not tracking your movements.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
Nuff said, switch from the necklace to Natal!
It would be fine for one person, but the perspective will only be for the person wearing the dorky necklace.
Figured that out all by yourself, eh?
Might look nice in the video. In a real installation, I fear the human eyes are just too good, and will quickly tell you that while that may seem like the golden gate bridge outside, it has no depth, and thus is more likely to be a 2D image than a 3D reality.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Nothing says "I'm always going to live alone" more then this.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
3D TVs + 3D glasses + this setup = problem solved!
Of course you'd make even nerdcore rappers look normal wearing that getup. But that's the price you pay (well that and $3000).
Totally going to have to have one of these with a field of stars moving in one direction, like the windows on a starship in Trek. I wonder how many of these you could have synched up. You could turn your house into a starship.
If you can read this, I forgot to post anonymously.
It would be fine for one person, but the perspective will only be for the person wearing the dorky necklace. It will be wierd and jarring for anyone else. "Waking up in the same place is boring" but more boring would be putting the thing on before you perk your coffee. Even putting on glasses was a pain in the ass thirty years after I started wearing them at age six, and they were totally necessary; I was blind without them. Nobody is going to get up and put that thing on first thing in the morning, especially after the novelty wears off.
Also, prior art -- Total Recall
Simple solution: if you are putting on your glasses every morning, then put a small reflector on the front, and bathe the room in IR. Works like a charm for head-sensing camera-based systems like TrackIR. If you habitually wear glasses, then you are, in fact, at a huge advantage for this sort of device, because there's zero impact to your daily routine, and only upside. Moreover, as long as you leave it on, it will continue to work every morning. Everyone else will have to remember to put something on, which gets to be a pain, and thus because it is not necessary, the neato-keeno device evenutaly will be forgotten or ignored.
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
I think that it's even more prior art -- Farenheit 451. And even more prior art than that, I just don't know what off hand...
Circular TV monitors in interior cabins. You can select ocean wave or aquarium scenes.
Not flaws if you had bothered to read the text below the video. They don't expect you to always wear the tracking necklace. It is just a novelty item they included.
Wind eye, an etymological, all time favourite of mine. From old norse, I can imagine my winter bound ancestor, The Seafarer looking through a wind eye. Not that anyone cares about the above or that I'm doing taxes today. :(
ideopath @ play
Well, if it's for yourself, then you are not screwing the patents. It's about the only benefit of patents to the general population.
Well, before Total Recall (1990) it already appeared on Aliens (1986), when Ripley is recovering in the hospital after the hibernation. Can't say about Fahrenheit 451 (1966) since I saw it a lot of years ago.
Ok. This freaks me out. It's a screensaver on my wall that tracks my movements via a fashion disaster.
I'll pass, thanks.
I am not a vegetarian werewolf.
How much does the baby cost? It seems to be an integral piece of the system.
The thing is, it still wouldn't look 3D, even if it had head tracking. It would be quite a weird effect for you to move and be able to look around but it would still be flat.
because the objects are at a distance you won't have any binocular ability so it will look just fine in 3D. The real weirdness is going to be latency. you move your head and the scene lags. It will give you the sensation you are falling over or falling into the scene.
Nice party joke if you don't mind cleaning up vomit.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Mod the parent up! Anyone who can tell you it can be done and then tells you how should be moderated up!
Small steps here, people. We already have face tracking. They'll go from the Wiimote to head tracking cameras pretty quickly and you won't need to wear anything special to make it work. Give it time.
No sig for you. YOU GET NO SIG!
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To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Then it is perfect for all the /. basement dwellers. When would they ever have more than one person in their basement?
the necklace and make it work for multiple people at the same time and then it will be more than just a gimmick.
Combine this with something like Project Natal so that the window could track the person and update the display depending on where they were and you'd have a near-perfect virtual window. Of course, I don't know how it would handle showing multiple people different views. Still, given some more refinement, you could have a frame that you hang on the wall that includes a screen, tracking hardware, and a specially designed computer to display the videos, etc. Design it right and you could extend it for other uses. Maybe it shows a virtual aquarium until a remote it picked up. Then a display comes up that lets you switch to TV mode (to watch live or recorded shows), Internet Mode (for browsing the web), etc.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
This reminds me of the HD plasma screens stuck all over the three Peppermill-owned casinos in Wendover, NV.
Gives you pretty scenes to look at while you wait for things or gamble with grandma.
You could turn your house into a starship.
... you'd need inertia anti-dampers to simulate that warp feeling.
Or maybe mount the entire house on hydraulic cylinders?
This will be a great tech to use for me to build a starship simulator.
I could make a 10-Forward room in my house that looks like the one on Star Trek.
Tsukasa: All I really want, is to be left alone...
if you are putting on your glasses every morning, then put a small reflector on the front
While this would work, I can only imagine what people who do this will look like on the beach or outside in the sunlight in general. Can you imagine a tour guide trying to give a presentation with 20 bright spots of light shining him in the eyes? My eyes! My eyes!
People would sparkle in the light like second-rate vampires. So uncool.
It would only have to reflect IR.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
My thought exactly...anybody building one of these *clearly* has no life and no wish to see the world first hand . Mod parent up!
When I first saw this headline, I immediately thought, "Oh, NO! Billgatus of Borg has finally assimilated /.!"
Then I realized that the view was from the Marin headlands, not Redmond.
Check out my novel.
This kind of technology only looks cool, when you watch in on a 2D screen.
But as soon as you see in in reality, before you, it’s very disappointing and kinda lame and pointless.
It’s amazing how many people can’t tell the difference between real 3D, stereo 2D or just this very simplistic adaptive mono 2D imagery...
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
Back to the Future Part 2 yet. Didn't they have a winscape in one of the scenes? Nice to see reality is catching up to 'science fiction'.
They like men with babies because it means they don't have to do it anymore. Apparently child-birth is a bit inconvenient or something. I don't know. Women eh, always bitching about trivial things.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Google's offices have installed Winscape with a view of everyone's living room.
Motion is a strong cue for 3D. Furthermore, stereo vision doesn't really work beyond a few yards anyway.
The real problem with these kinds of setups (and why you don't see them more) is that they only work for one person at a time.
I've seen this before, and with less clunky head trackers.
The tracker update rate has to be really fast, and the lag very low, or the effect breaks down. The fact that it's not stereoscopic, though, doesn't matter for distant scenes, like the Golden Gate Bridge shown. For the "aquarium", though, that will be a problem.
I just had this memento-flashback moment when I was watching this video... kinda creepy-weird moment. Imagine you wake up and see yourself traveling in Space, that would freak most people out, lolol. (with some classical music in the background, of course). I would totally be eating my nails and my fingers.
Perhaps 6.8ish - at least at the time of this posting. World population clock FTW And since we could fit them all in the United States alone with roughly the same population density of Connecticut, I think we are covered in terms of living space and crops. In fact, if we went to factory farms in Asia and Africa and cleaned out the populations to live Connecticut-style, we'd be covered (~750 people / sq. mile). Since that won't ever happen, we can still comfortably fit everyone with the same population density as Tennessee (which doesn't strike me as a very urban state) using everything but Australia and Antarctica - with lots of room for farms and such on each continent (especially Australia, which I emptied with my calculator).
Could it eventually become a problem? Anything is possible. Is it a problem now? No. Should more be done to educate rapid-growth societies of potential harm? Many think so. I am in favor of reasonable education towards all ends but I don't appreciate some of the tactics taken towards some individuals. Planned Parenthood started out as a racist organization (I have no current input and do not speculate about present policies) that sought to diminish minorities and lower income groups as a form of social eugenics. Any education needs to focus on good stewardship of the resources available rather than seeking to keep one group in control over another (since Rhodesia, Rwanda and others have shown how well that works).
I've been working on a slightly more ambitious (but still a ways off!) similar project, see http://jonathanclark.com. Initially I tried using a wiimote, but found it has a extremely limited coverage area and accuracy. If you move a few feet out of a sweet spot it will stop working, also the wiimote has a lot of noise in it's samples so you end up having to smooth the samples - but this introduces a lot of latency which destroys the illusion. On the low-cost end, the TrackIR system works a lot better (faster, more accurate samples). I have a demo using TrackIR posted here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tzKTJM5T0us&feature=player_embedded
TrackIR also has a limited area it can work with, so now I've moved to using OptiTrack which gets pricer but can cover fairly large areas (at least a small room).
One other issue I found is that flat video doesn't look entirely convincing because motion parallax should occur within a frame - for example, when you move left to right, the bridge and the water behind it should move at different speeds. To help address this, I'm currently trying to create a depth-map per video frame and convert that depth map into a mesh which the video is mapped onto. To start, I'm drawing the depth map by hand (should be ok if objects don't move much), but I'd like to create it automatically by filming from multiple angles and using feature point extraction to estimate the depth for every frame automatically.
-- Virtual Windows Project
This would be a great alternative to greenscreening a window for an indie movie production. Hang the remote on the cameraman, and then you dont have to worry about tracking the motion, and comping in a fake shot. And reflections from the room should show up correctly too.
Dont hate the media, become the media.
Simple solution: if you are putting on your glasses every morning, then put a small reflector on the front
Yes, that would work. Fortunately for me it wouldn't work for me, as I had my nearsightedness and age-related farsightedness surgically corrected. God but I love technology! Glasses suck, I'm glad to be rid of them.
But if your IR lamp was bright enough and your IR reciever sensitive enough, light reflected off your eyeballs would work.
Free Martian Whores!
Stick IR reflective dots on your forehead.
if you've got the money to use 50" plasma TVs in this way, you've got too much money. obama needs to tax your cadilac window plan.
It should be possible to make a Second Life viewer that works like this.
It may even include particle filtering, so, say, attack of the flying penises will look like a snowstorm.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
Add a light gun and you have a excellent duck-and-cover-shootem-up.
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i'm disappointed that i haven't seen anyone mention Total Recall in this thread.
Utilizing the synergization of benchmark e-solutions to pre-workaround action items!
You know, I was going to do a somewhat similar project... With a baseball cap. Put the IR source BEHIND the WII remote, and get a baseball cap or similar with a small IR reflective dot on it (front and back, for those who still want to look like Fred Durst). Blammo, no batteries around your neck. The only issue would be other IR reflective surfaces you might be wearing.
This sig has been enciphered with a one-time pad. It could say almost anything.
Mmmm... don't know if you Slash Dotters remember buy in Back to the Future 2 in Marty's future home they had a roll up screen which presented views just like the Winscape! Granted, this is way more sophisticated and eye catchy than the movies.... but the concept is the same!! ;)
~Cruxado ~
You know, I was going to do a somewhat similar project... With a baseball cap. Put the IR source BEHIND the WII remote, and get a baseball cap or similar with a small IR reflective dot on it (front and back, for those who still want to look like Fred Durst). Blammo, no batteries around your neck. The only issue would be other IR reflective surfaces you might be wearing.
It is nearly always advisable to look at what other efforts have done before embarking on a project. The TrackIR Pro has a doodad with three reflectors on it that clips to the user's baseball hat. The three reflectors are in known physical relation to each other, which allows the TrackIR software to extract head position, but it might also be used (I'm speculating at this point) to eliminate spurious inputs by only paying attention to reflections that are in a physically plausible configuration given the known dimensions of the doodad.
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.