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.

Comments

Re:Oh no money for software and content!

[DanoTime]

While I think $10 is absolutely reasonable - if you look deeper many of the scenes he shows are not available for sale. I'm sure if you were building the thing from scratch you would probably capture your own footage too. But non tinkerers rejoice - a kit may be for sale later for ~$3K

Re:The effect would be weird

[hey!]

I worked in a lab doing stereo vision research once. There's a lot more than stereopsis going on in depth perception. About 5% of the general population does not have stereopsis; 10% at age 65 and generally increasing thereafter. Often people who have this condition don't even know it.

The research I assisted on was on the impact of cognitive load on peripheral vision acuity (answer: none that we could find), but I also tinkered with stereograms. It turns out you can make them out of flat pictures by presenting disparate shadows to each eye. I got so good at looking at sterograms I didn't need a streoscope. I could look at a strip of Lunar photos from the Ranger mission and merge them into stereo images without any optical assistance.

In any case real world stereopsis only works at close range -- 25 meters or so is the max. As you approach that limit other cues become more important, including movement parallax, which is what this system exploits. If you looked at an image of something apparently fifty feet away or so, the fact that moving from side to side affects its apparent position and moving forward and back affects its size has a much stronger impact on your perception of depth and distance than stereopsis, even though stereopsis is theoretically operational at this distance. I'd bet the virtual object's distance would have to be quite close, say four meters or less, before your brain really starts to object.

So as far as a vista from your window -- say a view of the Golden Gate bridge -- stereopsis has absolutely no effect at all on the perception of 3D.

Re:The effect would be weird

[Jaruzel]

I've done this on a 8ft projector screen with Johny Chung Lee's original Wii head tracking mod, and I can assure you, the moment you move your head and the display updates, your brain is immediately fooled into seeing 3D.

Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jd3-eiid-Uw

-Jar