Slashdot Mirror
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.
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!
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.
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 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!
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
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 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.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
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.
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
Together, We Can Make Slashdot Better. I Do NOT Mod ACs. - Check Me Out
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
Hence the reason why the whole 3D thing is and will be nothing more than a gimmick.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."