head-tracking with Wii Remote - creating a 3D effect

[da_giz]

Hey guys,

I don't know if anyone has posted about that here before, I didn't see it. Was someone aware of this?
This guy figured out an easy way of how to do head tracking with a Wii remote. You can even see the 3D effect in this video, it's amazing!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jd3-eiid-Uw

The guy has even more ideas which are also really really cool and a written explanation of how to do it here:
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~johnny/projects/wii/

he even has other projects so you might want to browse his page a little bit

have fun,
da_giz

[crim3]

It's weird. I expended most of the time this morning watching his videos because a friend of mine sent me the links by email, and now it's mentioned here at the forum.
Sometimes it seems like information spreads out at speed of light in this information era.

[NITRO1250]

That is great!

[LukePC1]

I got a Link before, too - a couple of days ago...
I wanted to post about it, but the Forum was down, so I forgott...

I wish the knowledge of real S-3D was spreading that fast
Maybe it's because we don't have such a nice (on a 2D Display) viewable Clip...
I wonder how this technology worked in Games with 2D or 3D Display

[sharky]

this is great, but you dont see in real 3D with this.

it works with the camera because the camera has only one "eye"... but for humans you see the things in theback moving, but it remains flat. this would be GREAT if combined with 3D tecnology.

bye

sharky

[da_giz]

I guess sharky you are right, makes sense.

And the question is if it then would make sense to combine that head tracking with let's say an Iz3D monitor because you wouldn't be moving like that in front of the monitor anyways.

[Freke1]

Seems like everybody found it a few days ago. I turned it into a shorter video.
3D - a quick look:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-RUMPXdKocE
It's not 3D but it gives a good idea of what it looks like, I think.

Also I linked to MTBS3D.com.

[crim3]

For me the right place to put those LED's is a HMD. But that's because I'm a virtual reality fan.
With some kind of fake mouse driver and glovepie it could be translated to trackir protocol.

[CarlKenner]

TrackIR can't do that!

Well the TrackIR hardware could, but TrackIR games can't.

It is not just a matter of moving the in-game camera. In fact the screen completely stops being a picture taken by an in-game camera, and becomes something totally different. It becomes an optical illusion that only looks right if viewed from the correct angle. If viewed from any other angle, including sitting in front of the screen like normal, it looks horribly distorted.

Let me give you an example. Sitting in front of a screen with a normal aspect ratio. If you then move you head to the side a long way, and forward a bit, the screen will look very narrow and very tall, or at least it would if your brain didn't interpret it as a 3D image. Now if the game wants to render a cube that looks like it is behind your screen, on a line that passes through your eye and the middle of the screen, it needs to render it so that it looks equal width and height. To do that it will take up almost all the width of the screen and just a fraction of the height. Now imagine someone sitting directly in front of the screen while the game is rendering it for the person off to the side. The person in front of the screen will see a very wide, thin, rectangle. There is no way a normal in-game camera could render such an image.

It helps to think of being Wile E Coyote trying to draw a picture on a window to try to make it look like there is an object behind it that isn't really there. But then if the person viewing the window moves their head a bit, you have to redraw the image so that it still look correct from their perspective.

Fortunately Direct3D and OpenGL can render images like that by using a modified projection matrix, called an off-axis projection matrix, combined with the view matrix modifications to .

It is easy enough to make this system stereoscopic. Normally head-tracked perspective is combined with stereoscopic 3D, to make a proper Virtual Reality CAVE.

A future GlovePIE version will support this effect though (this was planned long before that video came out, I've been working on fishtank VR CAVEs based on consumer-level hardware for ages).


On another note, this is the first person I have seen that actually knows how to take a picture of a VR CAVE. Everyone else that photographs a VR CAVE makes me want to scream at them "Attach the camera to the tracker, you bloody idiot!". If you look at the CAVE Quake guy's webpage, the pictures completely fail to capture the effect which would look amazing if the tracker was actually on the camera.

[phil]

This is the default style of headtracking that you get in my demo game when you have a TrackIR plugged in (with TrackClip PRO).
(see thread)

The headtracking combines beautifully with the built-in stereoscopic modes. Why not give it a try!
(Er, you will need quite a powerful graphics card though )

Cheers,
phil

[CarlKenner]

Because I don't have a TrackIR

[cybereality]

Well the video was from last year but still worth posting for people that missed it. Its just about the coolest thing ever.