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Showing posts from January, 2013

A Tale of Cylinders and Ghosts

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When designing CAVE2, one of the first questions the team had to answer was: how is it going to look like? Very different form factors were taken into consideration, each with advantages and disadvantages. One big favorite (and final winner) was the cylinder. Building a VR system using a purely cylindrical form factor was desirable for many reasons. We could get good immersion and peripheral vision levels, a big active enclosed space, simplify  assembly, and get a nice, seamless aesthetic design. A big problem we had to solve with this design was limiting crosstalk levels on our passive stereo displays. When a user stands much above or below the display center, the polarization overlay will not match the correct display pixels anymore. The result is: you see ghosts. Well, ok, not really. But some of the light targeted for the left eye goes to the right eye, and vice versa, resulting in a blurry stereo image. We measured ghost levels on our test setups and concluded they were very cons

omegalib 3.2 released

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This is a maintenance version with a few changes and bugfixes in several omegalib modules. Major Changes omega reorganized log messages to simplify reading fixed a few Camera bugs Event setProcessed / isProcesed usable in Python omegaToolkit Image now supports refreshing with images of different dimensions Extended Widget Python API cyclops Textures can be created and updated using PixelData ? objects (C++ and python) Fixed Bump shader errors misc orun now tries to load config file based on loaded script. Also, added a couple of related fixes to Engine and module services simplified slider.py demo added ui render-to-texture example

The CAVESphere

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To interact with our CAVE2 system, we are implementing well known techniques like classic wand devices, but we are also experimenting with less traditional ideas. For instance, we successfully prototyped an intuitive object manipulation interface called CAVESphere, based on a plexiglass sphere with embedded tracking markers. The sphere also contains a camera and microphone, which we can use to detect finger taps on the sphere surface, providing simple touch input. Photo credit Lance Long.