Published: April 17, 2009 in future » interaction by Thomas Baekdal
A few days ago I posted the article about World Builder - a short film demonstrating a way for architects and builders to create the world of they're dreams using holographic projection. Aku commented, "Someone needs to invent a time machine soonish or I'll go mad with anticipation". But do we really need to wait? Could we do it today?
Eon Reality is currently selling a rather convincing 3D cube, in which you can move around in 3D. This would provide the rich visual feedback that we would need. Several car companies are already using some form of this to design cars.
(via IDEO Labs)
The 3D effect is created simply by wearing a pair of 3D glasses, and that opens up for the holographic projection. It would be a rather simple task to overlay a secondary image as a heads-up display, to provide the appearance of the holographic interface.
Finally you could use the Wii, an infrared lamp, and some reflective tape, to track and convert the movements of your hand and fingers. Much like Johnny Chung Lee did with his Wii presentations, that I wrote about some time ago. .
It wouldn't be real holographic projection, but it would come pretty close.
Aku,
Omnidirectional treadmills already exist and are used in similar applications:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omnidirectional_treadmill
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQw1tsgrJOs
As of finger tracking, I imagine the best solution would be to wear gloves with embedded infrared LEDs at the fingertips and *two* or more infrared cameras (or wiimotes :P) at different angles to the cube so they can track the LEDs in 3D space even if the person's body covers them.
And a shape-shifting floor would be cool but as you said that would be kinda hard. You could have the persons shoes tied to ropes or something that shorten when the person steps on something like stairs I guess. At any rate it's nice to see things like this being developed.
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Aku / Yousef, good suggestions!
I wonder how expensive it would be to install this in my house :)
You could put the whole room on hydraulic stilts or maybe even something where you could physically turn the whole room with some kind of mechanism that operated outside of the box.
When I was a kid we went to Disneyland in California and they had "Star Tours" where it was set up like you were in a spaceport and you entered a shuttle with a projector at the front and hydraulics underneath. I was pretty young but it was quite realistic to me at the time, it even felt like we were falling at certain points.
If you made the whole room so that it was like a cube sitting inside of a sphere that could rotate in any direction then you could move it any direction you wanted. Add the treadmill floor and then start putting tactile surfaces that can be programmed and it may start getting really scary. You could make it feel like you were climbing up a mountain, now that would be a simulation!
For the floor; a very large computer controlled "braille reader"
Anyone know of any communal inventor's sites?
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Apr 18
2009
Aku
WHOA. That 3D cube is really quite something. In the video, the man has trouble standing straight when the camera flies along and gets scared when they make him stand on a wall. 'Immersion' is definitely the right word.
There'd have to be just 2 additions for World Builder to be possible, both of which can be realized in some way:
1) A scrolling floor which moves backward as you walk forward to make sure you don't walk into the walls.
2) Position tracking for the fingers, so you can "touch" things and have them react.
But there's a problem too: If you are walking uphill or downhill or walking on stairs, the whole room would have to change shape for it to feel realistic.