8 ms·

Virtual Forest

198 points by habi 10y ago

jsingleton 10y ago
This is cool, it's a DIY 360 degree camera attached to a Raspberry Pi that you can view with a VR headset. This page is the build and parts list but the web VR using A-frame is at: http://virtualforest.io/vrforest.html http://virtualforest.io/vrforest.html
- tantalor 10y ago
  Demo is just a static image... isn't this supposed to be a webcam or something?
  - jsingleton 10y ago
    > Images stream live every 15 minutes from 4 - 22h in the EST (GMT-5) time zone There is a large 360 YouTube timelapse video here: http://virtualforest.io/vrtimelapse.html http://virtualforest.io/vrtimelapse.html If you want to do non-360 timelapse with the regular (and much cheaper) Pi camera then I wrote a guide: https://unop.uk/time-lapse-photography-with-a-raspberry-pi https://unop.uk/time-lapse-photography-with-a-raspberry-pi
- FoeNyx 10y ago
  > the web VR using A-frame is at: http://virtualforest.io/vrforest.html http://virtualforest.io/vrforest.html And it works better with WebGL enabled, else you get a rather empty page.
silverlight 10y ago
Doesn't seem to work for me on my HTC Vive but I've never used any A-Frame site before so I might just be doing it wrong. I tried on both Chrome and Firefox.
- moron4hire 10y ago
  For starters, you need an experimental build of Chromium that Google provides in a ZIP file, or you need Firefox Nightly, and in both cases you have to enable a flag. After that, I do not know what the current status is for A-Frame supporting the Vive. And of course, there was recently a big change to the WebVR API, so A-Frame may not be caught up to that, either. As far as I know, A-Frame's "known good configuration" is Oculus Rift + Firefox Nightly, or (HTC Vive|Oculus Rift) + not-latest Experimental Chromium. And Windows 10, of course, because Facebook can't find a single person capable of doing graphics work on Linux out of 15,000 employees, or so they would have us believe. You can find access to all of these things at http://www.webvr.info http://www.webvr.info
  - cbhl 10y ago
    > because Facebook can't find a single person capable of doing graphics work on Linux out of 15,000 employees Either you muck around with NVidia binary Linux drivers (or worse, binary drivers for some ARM chipset in an Android phone), or you're working with Intel stuff (which isn't going to give you a cutting-edge VR experience). A for-profit corporation has better things to spend its 20% time on.
  - ngokevin 10y ago
    A-Frame is caught up and supports the latest WebVR 1.1 changes. Rift/Nightly (until Vive support lands in FF), or Chromium builds.
leblancfg 10y ago
Great stuff! I'm a little frazzled by the fact that you're leaving 350$ cameras in the woods unattended, though. Figures they're not too far from your home given the CAT5 length you mention, but for anyone interested in building one in a more remote location (IoT SIMs with decent data plans are a thing now!), you might want to consider camouflage, and/or setting up in a tree.
- Raphmedia 10y ago
  > leaving 350$ cameras in the woods unattended Hunters do it all the time.
  - jdc0589 10y ago
    I worked on a revamp of the system for controlling those cameras remotely, viewing all your pictures, etc... (the cameras had cell modems) at my last job. Its insane. Not only are the cameras a little pricey (not crazy), but HOLY SHIT the data plans are expensive. Granted, that's where they make money, but still.
    - kobeya 10y ago
      Wha? Not anymore. You can get some really cheap data plans these days. Granted I don't know what the reception would be like out in the wilderness...
      - jdc0589 10y ago
        you can get cheap dataplans as a consumer, straight from the cell providers. Most of the game cameras do not let you just plug in a sim card. Most of the game camera companies act as resellers of data plans from places like Verizon and AT&T; so they 100% control the data plan rates.
- deanclatworthy 10y ago
  You'd be surprised how much untouched wilderness there is out there. And generally opportunistic criminals don't tend to be wandering through the wilderness looking for cameras to steal. And even then they're face will be recorded for all they know.
oliv__ 10y ago
Pretty cool. Make it live and add some sound and you could almost feel like you're there. Simple nitpick: when I drag to the left, I expect to go to the right. (I'm just seeing this through my browser though, maybe it makes sense in VR, idk.)
- moron4hire 10y ago
  There is no consensus on drag direction. I've built several projects and have alternated the drag direction on each and have always received vociferous complaints about both.
  - AndrewUnmuted 10y ago
    If there is no consensus on drag direction, Littlstar's player should be the consensus. It gives a major wedgie to every other player in the space, at the moment. Especially when it comes to motion and drag.
  - tedmiston 10y ago
    Or just make it a preference, like what Apple does with trackpad scrolling direction.
    - moron4hire 10y ago
      Making it a preference means creating a settings UI. People have their preference, but they are also adaptable. It's not immediately clear that a "VR" experience (not that I'd call 360° photo "VR") would benefit from a preferences UI.
- ngokevin 10y ago
  Doesn't really affect VR, VR is absolute. Those are just for desktop controls...sort of up to the developer which way they want it to drag, but the default is left/left...may have to update that since I do hear your preference is more common.
- dmarcos 10y ago
  Drag direction in 3D depends on user background and kind of application. It depends on if you expect to be moving the world or a virtual character. In the case of a panorama viewer I understand that some people might expect to move the picture (the world) as you do on a phone photo gallery or map application. For a first person interactive application it's more likely to expect that the character will turn to the direction you are dragging the mouse. You're controlling the character and not the world.
moron4hire 10y ago
This is incorrect: On mobile devices the A-frame framework will use the device sensors to figure out it's relative position. It will only figure out orientation, not position. Position is impossible to integrate from the low-end IMUs used in smartphones.
trezm 10y ago
I don't have a cardboard to properly see if the image really is "3D", but it seems like it's just a photosphere and therefore doesn't really have depth information. Is that right?
- trendia 10y ago
  That is correct. Sometime in the future, consumers will have software that can turn 2D images into simulated 3D [0]. It's still in dev mode right now, though. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oie1ZXWceqM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oie1ZXWceqM
  - lucidstack 10y ago
    That video is extremely impressive! Colour me excited
  - soylentcola 10y ago
    Yeah, and there are some other in-dev camera rigs that use multiple cameras plus software interpolation to simulate 3d as well. The thing that's most intriguing to me are the experiments using multiple depth cameras set up around a space and using software to build a live, 3d model and overlay the video data as a texture on top of the models. It's all very rudimentary and low-res at the moment but it's the sort of thing that can eventually become 3d/VR telepresence and that just strikes me as awesome.
- Joeboy 10y ago
  I'm very new to this sort of thing, but it seems like "stereoscopic video" isn't nearly as common as I expected it to be. 2D panoramas seem to be very much the norm. I'm not sure if this is down to production difficulty, delivery difficult or stereoscopy just not being impressive enough. One thing is that it seems to me that anything that's recorded by a camera (rather than rendered in realtime) is going to be "wrong" once you tilt your head, as your eyes are now on top of each other rather than next to each other.
- djsumdog 10y ago
  Reminds me of Quicktime VR. Does anyone remember Quicktime VR? I mean...we had this tech... in the early 90s.
tantalor 10y ago
Doesn't seem to work well with custom orientation in Chrome devtools: http://i.imgur.com/fp2kSO8.png http://i.imgur.com/fp2kSO8.png
- Sir_Cmpwn 10y ago
  So what? The idea that the developer should care about this is beyond comprehension.
- ngokevin 10y ago
  I recommend https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/webvr-api-emulation/gbdnpaebafagioggnhkacnaaahpiefil?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/webvr-api-emulatio...
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
neogodless 10y ago
Does anyone else find it weird that you click and drag in the opposite direction you (well I) would expect, considering that the cursor becomes a hand that grabs?
- mikeflynn 10y ago
  Yes. I came here to say this.
  - ngokevin 10y ago
    Filed a PR. https://github.com/aframevr/aframe/pull/1987 https://github.com/aframevr/aframe/pull/1987
dbrgn 10y ago
Really cool! I'll have to test this with Cardboard. The VR view seems to crash Firefox on Android 5 / 6 on two devices I tested though.
spyder 10y ago
It looks like it's just a single 360 camera with one viewpoint so it isn't really a "true immersive experience" on VR headsets, it's just a 2D image projected on a sphere. For true immersion in VR you need stereoscopic 360 degree recording, which can be achieved with using two of the 360 cameras or with this mount for GoPros: http://izugar.com/product/z6x3d.html http://izugar.com/product/z6x3d.html
- Joeboy 10y ago
  Surely if you have two 360° cameras, one of them will be capturing the other one. I would think you'd need one 360° camera rig with stereo pairs of cameras.
  - throw_away 10y ago
    With just two cameras, not only would you capture the other camera in view, but in those co-linear directions I don't believe it would be possible to get any depth information (or it would be all weird, like the same view, but magnified in one eye).
    - roywiggins 10y ago
      See: Lytro, which has struggled to find a good use for its lightfield cameras, but might actually have something now. Lightfield cameras can extract depth information directly, which lets them synthesize stereo views with a single camera. Duct-tape enough of them together and you can synthesize stereo views in every direction, which is pretty cool.
- sbierwagen 10y ago
  this mount for GoPros Six GoPros, to be specific.
0xdeadbeefbabe 10y ago
This is really cool, and I'm not complaining or feature creeping at all, but what about the sound of the forrest?
0xdeadbeefbabe 10y ago
What's the UBEC for? Edit: does it just convert the 24v to 5v, and why is that better than just doing 5v to begin with? Is this so you can get more current?
- m_eiman 10y ago
  If the power supply is far away it's better to have a higher voltage due to voltage drop due to cable resistance, 24V is pretty standard AFAIK.
DanBC 10y ago
There doesn't seem to be anything to control condensation. Do you think this might become a problem?
3ds 10y ago
The A-Frame framework that is mentioned can be found here: https://aframe.io/ https://aframe.io/
plaguuuuuu 10y ago
Pitch black. Not sure if nighttime, or not working correctly :P
- spartanatreyu 10y ago
  Looks like something is working, the browser is receiving an image and it's not a solid black colour, turning up the contrast to the max you can see some difference: http://i.imgur.com/Tm6J5iI.jpg http://i.imgur.com/Tm6J5iI.jpg I'm not sure if it's just image compression artefacts or that's what the camera is actually seeing before it's processed and sent to users.
ilaksh 10y ago
On Chrome on Nexus 6 with Android 7 get black screen regardless of orientation or screen touching/dragging.

198 points by habi 10y ago

This is cool, it's a DIY 360 degree camera attached to a Raspberry Pi that you can view with a VR headset. This page is the build and parts list but the web VR using A-frame is at: http://virtualforest.io/vrforest.html http://virtualforest.io/vrforest.html

tantalor 10y ago
Demo is just a static image... isn't this supposed to be a webcam or something?
- jsingleton 10y ago
  > Images stream live every 15 minutes from 4 - 22h in the EST (GMT-5) time zone There is a large 360 YouTube timelapse video here: http://virtualforest.io/vrtimelapse.html http://virtualforest.io/vrtimelapse.html If you want to do non-360 timelapse with the regular (and much cheaper) Pi camera then I wrote a guide: https://unop.uk/time-lapse-photography-with-a-raspberry-pi https://unop.uk/time-lapse-photography-with-a-raspberry-pi
FoeNyx 10y ago
> the web VR using A-frame is at: http://virtualforest.io/vrforest.html http://virtualforest.io/vrforest.html And it works better with WebGL enabled, else you get a rather empty page.

silverlight 10y ago

Doesn't seem to work for me on my HTC Vive but I've never used any A-Frame site before so I might just be doing it wrong. I tried on both Chrome and Firefox.

moron4hire 10y ago
For starters, you need an experimental build of Chromium that Google provides in a ZIP file, or you need Firefox Nightly, and in both cases you have to enable a flag. After that, I do not know what the current status is for A-Frame supporting the Vive. And of course, there was recently a big change to the WebVR API, so A-Frame may not be caught up to that, either. As far as I know, A-Frame's "known good configuration" is Oculus Rift + Firefox Nightly, or (HTC Vive|Oculus Rift) + not-latest Experimental Chromium. And Windows 10, of course, because Facebook can't find a single person capable of doing graphics work on Linux out of 15,000 employees, or so they would have us believe. You can find access to all of these things at http://www.webvr.info http://www.webvr.info
- cbhl 10y ago
  > because Facebook can't find a single person capable of doing graphics work on Linux out of 15,000 employees Either you muck around with NVidia binary Linux drivers (or worse, binary drivers for some ARM chipset in an Android phone), or you're working with Intel stuff (which isn't going to give you a cutting-edge VR experience). A for-profit corporation has better things to spend its 20% time on.
- ngokevin 10y ago
  A-Frame is caught up and supports the latest WebVR 1.1 changes. Rift/Nightly (until Vive support lands in FF), or Chromium builds.

leblancfg 10y ago

Great stuff! I'm a little frazzled by the fact that you're leaving 350$ cameras in the woods unattended, though. Figures they're not too far from your home given the CAT5 length you mention, but for anyone interested in building one in a more remote location (IoT SIMs with decent data plans are a thing now!), you might want to consider camouflage, and/or setting up in a tree.

Raphmedia 10y ago
> leaving 350$ cameras in the woods unattended Hunters do it all the time.
- jdc0589 10y ago
  I worked on a revamp of the system for controlling those cameras remotely, viewing all your pictures, etc... (the cameras had cell modems) at my last job. Its insane. Not only are the cameras a little pricey (not crazy), but HOLY SHIT the data plans are expensive. Granted, that's where they make money, but still.
  - kobeya 10y ago
    Wha? Not anymore. You can get some really cheap data plans these days. Granted I don't know what the reception would be like out in the wilderness...
    - jdc0589 10y ago
      you can get cheap dataplans as a consumer, straight from the cell providers. Most of the game cameras do not let you just plug in a sim card. Most of the game camera companies act as resellers of data plans from places like Verizon and AT&T; so they 100% control the data plan rates.
deanclatworthy 10y ago
You'd be surprised how much untouched wilderness there is out there. And generally opportunistic criminals don't tend to be wandering through the wilderness looking for cameras to steal. And even then they're face will be recorded for all they know.

oliv__ 10y ago

Pretty cool. Make it live and add some sound and you could almost feel like you're there. Simple nitpick: when I drag to the left, I expect to go to the right. (I'm just seeing this through my browser though, maybe it makes sense in VR, idk.)

moron4hire 10y ago
There is no consensus on drag direction. I've built several projects and have alternated the drag direction on each and have always received vociferous complaints about both.
- AndrewUnmuted 10y ago
  If there is no consensus on drag direction, Littlstar's player should be the consensus. It gives a major wedgie to every other player in the space, at the moment. Especially when it comes to motion and drag.
- tedmiston 10y ago
  Or just make it a preference, like what Apple does with trackpad scrolling direction.
  - moron4hire 10y ago
    Making it a preference means creating a settings UI. People have their preference, but they are also adaptable. It's not immediately clear that a "VR" experience (not that I'd call 360° photo "VR") would benefit from a preferences UI.
ngokevin 10y ago
Doesn't really affect VR, VR is absolute. Those are just for desktop controls...sort of up to the developer which way they want it to drag, but the default is left/left...may have to update that since I do hear your preference is more common.
dmarcos 10y ago
Drag direction in 3D depends on user background and kind of application. It depends on if you expect to be moving the world or a virtual character. In the case of a panorama viewer I understand that some people might expect to move the picture (the world) as you do on a phone photo gallery or map application. For a first person interactive application it's more likely to expect that the character will turn to the direction you are dragging the mouse. You're controlling the character and not the world.

moron4hire 10y ago

This is incorrect: On mobile devices the A-frame framework will use the device sensors to figure out it's relative position. It will only figure out orientation, not position. Position is impossible to integrate from the low-end IMUs used in smartphones.

trezm 10y ago

I don't have a cardboard to properly see if the image really is "3D", but it seems like it's just a photosphere and therefore doesn't really have depth information. Is that right?

trendia 10y ago
That is correct. Sometime in the future, consumers will have software that can turn 2D images into simulated 3D [0]. It's still in dev mode right now, though. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oie1ZXWceqM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oie1ZXWceqM
- lucidstack 10y ago
  That video is extremely impressive! Colour me excited
- soylentcola 10y ago
  Yeah, and there are some other in-dev camera rigs that use multiple cameras plus software interpolation to simulate 3d as well. The thing that's most intriguing to me are the experiments using multiple depth cameras set up around a space and using software to build a live, 3d model and overlay the video data as a texture on top of the models. It's all very rudimentary and low-res at the moment but it's the sort of thing that can eventually become 3d/VR telepresence and that just strikes me as awesome.
Joeboy 10y ago
I'm very new to this sort of thing, but it seems like "stereoscopic video" isn't nearly as common as I expected it to be. 2D panoramas seem to be very much the norm. I'm not sure if this is down to production difficulty, delivery difficult or stereoscopy just not being impressive enough. One thing is that it seems to me that anything that's recorded by a camera (rather than rendered in realtime) is going to be "wrong" once you tilt your head, as your eyes are now on top of each other rather than next to each other.
djsumdog 10y ago
Reminds me of Quicktime VR. Does anyone remember Quicktime VR? I mean...we had this tech... in the early 90s.

tantalor 10y ago

Doesn't seem to work well with custom orientation in Chrome devtools: http://i.imgur.com/fp2kSO8.png http://i.imgur.com/fp2kSO8.png

Sir_Cmpwn 10y ago
So what? The idea that the developer should care about this is beyond comprehension.
ngokevin 10y ago
I recommend https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/webvr-api-emulation/gbdnpaebafagioggnhkacnaaahpiefil?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/webvr-api-emulatio...

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

neogodless 10y ago

Does anyone else find it weird that you click and drag in the opposite direction you (well I) would expect, considering that the cursor becomes a hand that grabs?

mikeflynn 10y ago
Yes. I came here to say this.
- ngokevin 10y ago
  Filed a PR. https://github.com/aframevr/aframe/pull/1987 https://github.com/aframevr/aframe/pull/1987

dbrgn 10y ago

Really cool! I'll have to test this with Cardboard. The VR view seems to crash Firefox on Android 5 / 6 on two devices I tested though.

spyder 10y ago

It looks like it's just a single 360 camera with one viewpoint so it isn't really a "true immersive experience" on VR headsets, it's just a 2D image projected on a sphere. For true immersion in VR you need stereoscopic 360 degree recording, which can be achieved with using two of the 360 cameras or with this mount for GoPros: http://izugar.com/product/z6x3d.html http://izugar.com/product/z6x3d.html

Joeboy 10y ago
Surely if you have two 360° cameras, one of them will be capturing the other one. I would think you'd need one 360° camera rig with stereo pairs of cameras.
- throw_away 10y ago
  With just two cameras, not only would you capture the other camera in view, but in those co-linear directions I don't believe it would be possible to get any depth information (or it would be all weird, like the same view, but magnified in one eye).
  - roywiggins 10y ago
    See: Lytro, which has struggled to find a good use for its lightfield cameras, but might actually have something now. Lightfield cameras can extract depth information directly, which lets them synthesize stereo views with a single camera. Duct-tape enough of them together and you can synthesize stereo views in every direction, which is pretty cool.
sbierwagen 10y ago
this mount for GoPros Six GoPros, to be specific.

0xdeadbeefbabe 10y ago

This is really cool, and I'm not complaining or feature creeping at all, but what about the sound of the forrest?

0xdeadbeefbabe 10y ago

What's the UBEC for? Edit: does it just convert the 24v to 5v, and why is that better than just doing 5v to begin with? Is this so you can get more current?

m_eiman 10y ago
If the power supply is far away it's better to have a higher voltage due to voltage drop due to cable resistance, 24V is pretty standard AFAIK.

DanBC 10y ago

There doesn't seem to be anything to control condensation. Do you think this might become a problem?

3ds 10y ago

The A-Frame framework that is mentioned can be found here: https://aframe.io/ https://aframe.io/

plaguuuuuu 10y ago

Pitch black. Not sure if nighttime, or not working correctly :P

spartanatreyu 10y ago
Looks like something is working, the browser is receiving an image and it's not a solid black colour, turning up the contrast to the max you can see some difference: http://i.imgur.com/Tm6J5iI.jpg http://i.imgur.com/Tm6J5iI.jpg I'm not sure if it's just image compression artefacts or that's what the camera is actually seeing before it's processed and sent to users.

ilaksh 10y ago

On Chrome on Nexus 6 with Android 7 get black screen regardless of orientation or screen touching/dragging.