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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.
Now my bomb shelter will be perfect
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!
Now you can leave your mom's basement, without ever leaving your mom's basement.
Beauty is in the eye of the beerholder.
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
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.
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
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Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.