Category Archives: VR Hardware

Reviews of, and analyses of the capabilities of, VR-relevant hardware.

On the road for VR: zSpace developers conference

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I went to zCon 2013, the zSpace developers conference, held in the Computer History Museum in Mountain View yesterday and today. As I mentioned in my previous post about the zSpace holographic display, my interest in it is as an alternative to our current line of low-cost holographic displays, which require assembly and careful calibration by the end user before they can be used. The zSpace, on the other hand, is completely plug&play: its optical trackers (more on them below) are integrated into the display screen itself, so they can be calibrated at the factory and work out-of-the-box.

Figure 1: The zSpace holographic display and how it would really look like when seen from this point of view.

So I drove around the bay to get a close look at the zSpace, to determine its viability for my purpose. Bottom line, it will work (with some issues, more on that below). My primary concerns were threefold: head tracking precision and latency, stylus tracking precision and latency, and stereo quality (i.e., amount of crosstalk between the eyes).

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First impressions from the Oculus Rift dev kit

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My friend Serban got his Oculus Rift dev kit in the mail today, and he called me over to check it out. I will hold back a thorough evaluation until I get the Rift supported natively in my own VR software, so that I can run a direct head-to-head comparison with my other HMDs, and also my screen-based holographic display systems (the head-tracked 3D TVs, and of course the CAVE), using the same applications. Specifically, I will use the Quake ||| Arena viewer to test the level of “presence” provided by the Rift; as I mentioned in my previous post, there are some very specific physiological effects brought out by that old chestnut, and my other HMDs are severely lacking in that department, and I hope that the Rift will push it close to the level of the CAVE. But here are some early impressions.

Figure 1: What it would look like to unbox an Oculus VR dev kit, if one were to have such a thing.

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The reality of head-mounted displays

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So it appears the Oculus Rift is really happening. A buddy of mine went in early on the kickstarter, and his will supposedly be in the mail some time this week. In a way the Oculus Rift, or, more precisely, the most recent foray of VR into the mainstream that it embodies, was the reason why I started this blog in the first place. I’m very much looking forward to it (more on that below), but I’m also somewhat worried that the huge level of pre-release excitement in the gaming world might turn into a backlash against VR in general. So I made a video laying out my opinions (see Figure 1, or the embedded video below).

Figure 1: Still from a video describing how head-mounted displays should be used to create convincing virtual worlds.

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Intel’s “perceptual computing” initiative

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I went to the Sacramento Hacker Lab last night, to see a presentation by Intel about their soon-to-be-released “perceptual computing” hardware and software. Basically, this is Intel’s answer to the Kinect: a combined color and depth camera with noise- and echo-cancelling microphones, and an integrated SDK giving access to derived head tracking, finger tracking, and voice recording data.

Figure 1: What perceptual computing might look like at some point in the future, according to the overactive imaginations of Intel marketing people. Original image name: “Security Force Field.jpg” Oh, sure.

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Low-cost VR for materials science

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In my ongoing series on VR’s stubborn refusal to just get on with it and croak already, here’s an update from the materials science front. Lilian Dávila, former UC Davis grad student and now professor at UC Merced, was recently featured in a three-part series about cutting-edge digital research at UC Merced, produced by the PR arm of the University of California. Here’s the 10-minute short focusing on her use of low-cost holographic displays for interactive design and analysis of nanostructures:

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On the road for VR part II: Tahoe Environmental Research Center, Incline Village, Lake Tahoe

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We have been collaborating with the UC Davis Tahoe Environmental Research Center (TERC) for a long time. Back in — I think — 2006, we helped them purchase a large-screen stereoscopic projection system for the Otellini 3-D Visualization Theater and installed a set of Vrui-based KeckCAVES visualization applications for guided virtual tours of Lake Tahoe and the entire Earth. We have since worked on joint projects, primarily related to informal science education. Currently, TERC is one of the collaborators in the 3D lake science informal science education grant that spawned the Augmented Reality Sandbox.

The original stereo projection system, driven by a 2006 Mac Pro, was getting long in the tooth, and in the process of upgrading to higher-resolution and brighter projectors, we finally convinced the powers-that-be to get a top-of-the line Linux PC instead of yet another Mac (for significant savings, one might add). While the Ubuntu OS and Vrui application set had already been pre-installed by KeckCAVES staff in the home office, I still had to go up to the lake to configure the operating system and Vrui to render to the new projectors, update all Vrui software, align the projectors, and train the local docents in using Linux and the new Vrui application versions.

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First VR environment in Estonia powered by Vrui

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Now here’s some good news: I mentioned recently that reports of VR’s death are greatly exaggerated, and now I am happy to announce that researchers with the Institute of Cybernetics at Tallinn University of Technology have constructed the country’s first immersive display system, and I’m prowd to say it’s powered by the Vrui toolkit. The three-screen, back-projected display was entirely designed and built in-house. Its main designers, PhD student Emiliano Pastorelli and his advisor Heiko Herrmann, kindly sent several diagrams and pictures, see Figures 1, 2, 3, and 4.

Figure 1: Engineering diagram of Tallinn University of Technology’s new VR display, provided by Emiliano Pastorelli.

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AR Sandbox news

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The first “professionally built” AR sandbox, whose physical setup was designed and built by the fine folks from the San Francisco Exploratorium, arrived at its new home at ECHO Lake Aquarium and Science Center.

Figure 1: Picture of ECHO Lake Aquarium and Science Center’s Augmented Reality Sandbox during installation on the exhibit floor. Note the portrait orientation of the sand table with respect to the back panel, the projector tilt to make up for it, and the high placement of the Kinect camera (visible at the very top of the picture). Photo provided by Travis Cook, ECHO.

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On the road for VR (sort of…): ILMF ’13, Denver, CO

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I just returned from the 2013 International LiDAR Mapping Forum (ILMF ’13), where I gave a talk about LiDAR Viewer (which I haven’t previously written about here, but I really should). ILMF is primarily an event for industry exhibitors and LiDAR users from government agencies or private companies to meet. I only saw one other person from the academic LiDAR community there, and my talk stuck out like a sore thumb, too (see Figure 1).

Figure 1: Snapshot from towards the end of my talk at ILMF ’13, kindly provided by Marshall Millett. My talk was a bit off-topic for the rest of the conference, and at 8:30 in the morning, hopefully explaining the sparse audience.

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ZSpace: a turn-key holographic display

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Figure 1: A marketing image for the zSpace holographic display. Image taken from http://zspace.com.

I’ve been waiting for this for such a long time: a turn-key stereoscopic display with built-in pre-calibrated head tracking and tracked input device. We’ve been in the low-cost VR business for more than four years now, but the biggest problem is that our reference design is entirely DIY. Users have to go out and buy individual components, assemble them, and then — most importantly — calibrate them with respect to each other. This calibration step is the biggest hurdle for low-cost VR’s acceptance, because the idea behind it is somewhat hard to understand for VR non-experts, and even if it’s understood, it still requires expensive non-standard tools.

The solution, of course, is simple: instead of having the display and tracking system as separate entities that need to be calibrated with respect to each other, integrate them into the same frame, and pre-calibrate them at the factory. The only thing that had to happen was for a manufacturer to step up to the plate and make it so.

Voilá, I present the zSpace holographic display (see Figure 1).

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