AntVR - what happened?
Posted: Tue Dec 16, 2014 4:36 am
Hi to all, I only saw today the AntVR and even saw it made it on Kickstarter!
I also saw some of the negativism and I agree with most of it, especially on the positional tracking, which is simply impossible with the accelerometers. Come on, the guy is into robotics and does not know this http://m.youtube.com/#/watch?v=_q_8d0E3tDk ??? If you play for 5 minutes with the wii and glovepie you will know this too... My esperience with Chinese IMU guns is also bad, referring to the MAG II (I think it's originally Chinese, I hope I did not get a Chinese Copy...)
Now, this is not meant to rant about Ant VR, but to say that it has some nice and neat ideas like IMU gun, positional tracking and an attept of a workaround for standard non-modded FPSs. BTW, here is a concept of playing standard FPSs that should be closest to workable http://m.youtube.com/watch?feature=yout ... I0b0ZYKDUw
I just think the ideas that were in this project were not bad and with some tweaking they can be implemented the right way and can still be workable. I will not comment on the quality of the VR headset, since I don't have enough experience with these, but I guess they can still do a half-ass job cheaply enough to enable you to play in short 10 min bursts and be on par with DK1 and not give you motion sickness.
The gun will need a good IMU with good fusion implementation, but that's within the reach of Chinese developers too.
The positional tracking can be done easily like in freetrack, you only need to put a wiimote camera on a ceiling with correct height and put the 3-point IR marker on your head facing upwards instead of forward and swap the rotation axes. That can couple as correction for your HMD IMU.
And lastly, the compatibility in terms of motion controls. It cannot be ideal, but for PC games the second video that I linked should be a viable second-best implementation. For Playstation titles, I have tested the MAG II with PS3 and it does emulate correctly a PS3 dual shock, so this is definitely doable, but you simply need a good IMU and the one in MAG II is not one of these. Also, a VR setup should be easier on the yaw sensitivity requirements than an in-front-of-TV scenario, since your yaw movements in VR are much more pronounced and even a small yaw drift blocked with a threshold pass filter should give good results. The hold-button-to-aim approach should also ameliorate the perception of drift.
Of course, in terms of 3d effect, you are also limited by the games that can output SBS 3d natively or with third party software. For the rest of the PC games you will have to contend with 2d, which is not ideal, but is not bad if you have all the motion tracking working.
So the question is, is AntVR dead, or is it being optimised with the things that I mentioned, or has someone else picked up from where AntVR left?
I also saw some of the negativism and I agree with most of it, especially on the positional tracking, which is simply impossible with the accelerometers. Come on, the guy is into robotics and does not know this http://m.youtube.com/#/watch?v=_q_8d0E3tDk ??? If you play for 5 minutes with the wii and glovepie you will know this too... My esperience with Chinese IMU guns is also bad, referring to the MAG II (I think it's originally Chinese, I hope I did not get a Chinese Copy...)
Now, this is not meant to rant about Ant VR, but to say that it has some nice and neat ideas like IMU gun, positional tracking and an attept of a workaround for standard non-modded FPSs. BTW, here is a concept of playing standard FPSs that should be closest to workable http://m.youtube.com/watch?feature=yout ... I0b0ZYKDUw
I just think the ideas that were in this project were not bad and with some tweaking they can be implemented the right way and can still be workable. I will not comment on the quality of the VR headset, since I don't have enough experience with these, but I guess they can still do a half-ass job cheaply enough to enable you to play in short 10 min bursts and be on par with DK1 and not give you motion sickness.
The gun will need a good IMU with good fusion implementation, but that's within the reach of Chinese developers too.
The positional tracking can be done easily like in freetrack, you only need to put a wiimote camera on a ceiling with correct height and put the 3-point IR marker on your head facing upwards instead of forward and swap the rotation axes. That can couple as correction for your HMD IMU.
And lastly, the compatibility in terms of motion controls. It cannot be ideal, but for PC games the second video that I linked should be a viable second-best implementation. For Playstation titles, I have tested the MAG II with PS3 and it does emulate correctly a PS3 dual shock, so this is definitely doable, but you simply need a good IMU and the one in MAG II is not one of these. Also, a VR setup should be easier on the yaw sensitivity requirements than an in-front-of-TV scenario, since your yaw movements in VR are much more pronounced and even a small yaw drift blocked with a threshold pass filter should give good results. The hold-button-to-aim approach should also ameliorate the perception of drift.
Of course, in terms of 3d effect, you are also limited by the games that can output SBS 3d natively or with third party software. For the rest of the PC games you will have to contend with 2d, which is not ideal, but is not bad if you have all the motion tracking working.
So the question is, is AntVR dead, or is it being optimised with the things that I mentioned, or has someone else picked up from where AntVR left?