Competition

[TeraBit]

Hi All,

Since things are looking like ramping up for TDVision from August, I was thinking about ways to generate more interest in HMDs and the TDVisor in general.

Perhaps a competition to come up with the most innovative upgrade to a HMD. (i.e. if you have an idea for head tracking, it would need to be innovative rather than just whacking a Wii controller on your head )

It could be fun and perhaps if there are enough entries the most useful / innovative idea might get a complimentary TDVisor-HD at launch or somthing cool like that. 8)

Even if there is no prize involved it could add to the development of the technology and present an idea of what users are interested in.

[LukePC1]

I'm not shure, what you want to know...

but a good Headtracker could work with measuring the force (from accelarating and gravity) in every direction (3dof or how it's called) and maybe add the force for turning to it (3more degrees of freedom).

If this is acurate enough, the headtracker could always know, how much you moved and calculate from that where you are now, compared to the starting position...

However I think that is exactly, what a wii and many other headtrackers use.
Additionally it could be combined with a compass or IR to know, where the starting location is or to reduce 'drifting'.


A great thing would be to free the view from the shooting direction in First Person games. However this would need a very complex driver or a lot of work for the GPU:

1) Make the first frame to know, where the crosshair is shooting.
2) Make left part of S-3D picture
3) Make right part of S-3D picture
4) Combine both 3D pictures and build the crosshair from step 1) in it.

This could provide a driver based headtracking without the need of moding the games... But somehow I doubt, it would work perfectly

Well one of the simplest (IR) headtrackers would have a good impact in all Simulators (Racing or flying).



Was this what you wanted to hear?

[TeraBit]

Was this what you wanted to hear?

That kind of thing, although I think that TDVision are likley going to stick with the iZ3D drivers for the time being, so I'm not sure anything that changes that bit of the loop would be possible atm.

Also ideas about how something might be achieved. e.g.

How about a magnetic head tracker that doesn't just use the earth's ambient magnetic field, but which comes with a small low level electro magnetic field emitter which you can place on the top of your monitor (or where ever, I suppose you could wear it as a necklace ) to make that the 'North' point and override any drift caused by ambient magnetic interference.

I suppose the main thrust of a HMD is immersion, so what might make the experience more immersive?

[android78]

How about a magnetic head tracker that doesn't just use the earth's ambient magnetic field

The problem with that is that the earths magnetic field is actually quite strong to that of a magnet so you can hardly notice the field once you get more then a few cm away from it.
I've often had the idea that we should be able to create something similar to what GPS uses and have multiple sources of radio transmitter operating on slightly different frequency and position and heading could be calculated by getting a difference in signal times when they reach the receiver, The problem with this is that you'd have to be able to capture at over 300 GHz to get a resolution of 1 cm (which is still not acceptable for calculating heading.
The other way I thought about is still using radio waves transmitted from several locations, but essentially you'd be looking for the interference pattern in waves. given that this way you could have 3 transmitters with slightly varying frequencies of approx. 10 GHZ, this would allow for about 3m range of movement before the interference patterns would start to repeat, and even then, you'd be able to use some smarts to figure out which way you were moving when the pattern started repeating. I think this is the most viable way, now all we need is to go back and look at our signal analysis. lol

[TeraBit]

The problem with that is that the earths magnetic field is actually quite strong to that of a magnet so you can hardly notice the field once you get more then a few cm away from it.

I see. I suppose I never thought about it that way. The other ideas are interesting, but as you say have problems of their own (not to mention they're probably expensive to implement).

[cybereality]

Personally I think the way to go is with computer-vision algorithms. If you had like HD camera on an HMD you could probably get good tracking in the right environment. Since the camera would see the real world, the headtracking should always be somewhat accurate (maybe not precise). But it would eliminate a lot of the drift for sure. Maybe some combination of a camera/accelerometers like the Wii. Surely it can be done somehow.