Tag Archives: low-cost VR

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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When the novelty is gone…

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I just found this old photo on one of my cameras, and it’s too good not to share. It shows former master’s student Peter Gold (now in the PhD program at UT Austin) working with a high-resolution aerial LiDAR scan of the El Mayor-Cucapah fault rupture after the April 2010 earthquake (here is the full-resolution picture, for the curious).

Figure 1: Former master’s student Peter Gold in the CAVE, analyzing a high-resolution aerial LiDAR scan of the El Mayor-Cucapah fault rupture.

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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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Low-cost 3D displays using Razer Hydra devices

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I’ve previously written about our low-cost VR environments based on 3D TVs and optical tracking. While “low-cost” compared to something like a CAVE, they are still not exactly cheap (around $7000 all told), and not exactly easy to install.

What I haven’t mentioned before is that we have an even lower-cost, and, more importantly, easier to install, alternative using just a 3D TV and a Razer Hydra gaming input device. These environments are not holographic because they don’t have head tracking, but they are still very usable for a large variety of 3D applications. We have several of these systems in production use, and demonstrated them to the public twice, in our booth at the 2011 and 2012 AGU fall meetings. What we found there is that the environments are very easy to use; random visitors walking into our booth and picking up the controllers were able to control fairly complex software in a matter of minutes.

A user controlling a low-cost 3D display (running the Nanotech Construction Kit) with a Razer Hydra 6-DOF tracked input device.

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