Well, when i asked my colleague if he ever walked into a wall using the system, he said he had - he was trying to pick up some ammo, but it was about a meter off (in the game, compared to where it was displayed on his HUD).
He said its not perfect but that it was enough to 'fool' the user into being able to interact (to the extent of shooting the monsters, and seeing them duck behind buildings etc)
When standing on a point, you can loko around and it mapped well - the headgear had position/orientation type things (didnt go into too much detail)
Oh - he also said that they were using differential GPS, but that was the year that they turned off the scrambling (not the right word, i know) - and DGPS isnt much better than the unscrambled GPS (something about propogation time and atmospherics - been a while since we talked about GPS)
Wyzfen
note: see my earlier post for more info
Turns out i work with one of the people that worked on this - it was an honours project done 3 years ago. They could have one person running around in the (very pricey) head gear etc (carrying a laptop and a small car battery on their backs - unfit geeks beware), while others played on regular pcs (mmm. multiplayer - only one set of gear tho). With more current technology, this could be made a lot more useable - think embedded linux etc.
Some of the interesting things my colleague said: - it was very immersive - sometimes they had to stop someone running onto a road to pick up the ammo they saw. - a quake map was made then used to model the real world - that is, it used the pregenerated map to do get occlusion info etc - they used quake 1 becuase the source is available - the issue of a 'respawn' point was never dealt with - guess they all got so good at quake they never died ?
Slashdot Mirror
Well, when i asked my colleague if he ever walked into a wall using the system, he said he had - he was trying to pick up some ammo, but it was about a meter off (in the game, compared to where it was displayed on his HUD). He said its not perfect but that it was enough to 'fool' the user into being able to interact (to the extent of shooting the monsters, and seeing them duck behind buildings etc) When standing on a point, you can loko around and it mapped well - the headgear had position/orientation type things (didnt go into too much detail) Oh - he also said that they were using differential GPS, but that was the year that they turned off the scrambling (not the right word, i know) - and DGPS isnt much better than the unscrambled GPS (something about propogation time and atmospherics - been a while since we talked about GPS) Wyzfen note: see my earlier post for more info
Turns out i work with one of the people that worked on this - it was an honours project done 3 years ago.
They could have one person running around in the (very pricey) head gear etc (carrying a laptop and a small car battery on their backs - unfit geeks beware), while others played on regular pcs (mmm. multiplayer - only one set of gear tho).
With more current technology, this could be made a lot more useable - think embedded linux etc.
Some of the interesting things my colleague said:
- it was very immersive - sometimes they had to stop someone running onto a road to pick up the ammo they saw.
- a quake map was made then used to model the real world - that is, it used the pregenerated map to do get occlusion info etc
- they used quake 1 becuase the source is available
- the issue of a 'respawn' point was never dealt with - guess they all got so good at quake they never died ?
Wyzfen