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I remember when I first visited Google a friend of mine who worked there very excitedly showed this to me. I was terribly unimpressed because at the time I was

by shaddi 16y ago

I remember when I first visited Google a friend of mine who worked there very excitedly showed this to me. I was terribly unimpressed because at the time I was interning at the Jet Propulsion Lab and I had already seen their version of this: http://lucyabramyan.com/Site/Stage.html http://lucyabramyan.com/Site/Stage.html One of my co-workers had built this awesome immersive environment using back-projection, so you didn't have any of the frame boundaries like the Google version did. It was particularly well-suited to viewing the panoramas sent back from the Mars rovers.

gregable 16y ago
At Virginia Tech, we did something similar with back projection called the CAVE. It was a cube (4 sides at least) of back projections large enough that you could walk into it. One of the sides was the floor, which was particularly challenging to set up. All of the projections were also 3D using glasses that used quick on/off flipping (better IMHO than the polarized things at movie theaters) and the system had physical devices (we called them wands) that new their 3d location inside the cube. Essentially, we had what seemed like a first generation "holodeck" (trademarked term unfortunately). Someone somewhere had even modified quake to work in this environment with the wands controlling the location of your gun in 3d space. It was pretty interesting. Of course, I'm not sure how practical something like this is, and it's very expensive to build.
- aikinai 16y ago
  Oh yeah, I'd totally forgotten about the CAVE! I got to go in there once to play around. You forgot to mention another important part, which was that one of the "wands" was actually a headset that would track the user and change the perspective based on their head movements. At least some applications worked that way. I'm not sure why, but the one I tried had a teapot rendered over my head and I could see the snout sticking out in front of my face wherever I went.

by shaddi 16y ago

gregable 16y ago

At Virginia Tech, we did something similar with back projection called the CAVE. It was a cube (4 sides at least) of back projections large enough that you could walk into it. One of the sides was the floor, which was particularly challenging to set up. All of the projections were also 3D using glasses that used quick on/off flipping (better IMHO than the polarized things at movie theaters) and the system had physical devices (we called them wands) that new their 3d location inside the cube. Essentially, we had what seemed like a first generation "holodeck" (trademarked term unfortunately). Someone somewhere had even modified quake to work in this environment with the wands controlling the location of your gun in 3d space. It was pretty interesting. Of course, I'm not sure how practical something like this is, and it's very expensive to build.

aikinai 16y ago
Oh yeah, I'd totally forgotten about the CAVE! I got to go in there once to play around. You forgot to mention another important part, which was that one of the "wands" was actually a headset that would track the user and change the perspective based on their head movements. At least some applications worked that way. I'm not sure why, but the one I tried had a teapot rendered over my head and I could see the snout sticking out in front of my face wherever I went.