Augmented Reality Sandbox....WTF??? May be the coolest thing I have ever seen....

originally posted by: Skid Mark
a reply to: MystikMushroom

What you need is a holodeck.
Yes, I'm a dork lol.

I was talking to a buddy about how cool it would be to build an entire room with this tech....walk through and play in the sand. This would be my kids' dream come true....

a reply to: Vasa Croe

The sandbox has some lag!

a reply to: Vasa Croe

To hell with the kids...I want one!

Jude

So many applications! It's nice seeing humanity going in the right direction from time to time.

This is a great tool when teaching geography, landscapes, and how the planet works at a basic scale. I would have loved this when I was a child, and would definitely get/build one for my kids. It makes the topic more fun and inviting than reading textbooks, that's for sure!

a reply to: Vasa Croe

For those who played the card games Yu Gi Oh,Magic etc. expect holographic games coming out in the near future.

originally posted by: MystikMushroom
*sigh*

Were are my VR goggles that beam the digital reality directly onto my retinas? I'm not talking google glass or Microsoft's new gizmo..I'm talking an immersive and all-consuming "V-World" complete with haptic gloves to touch/manipulate the virtual world?

I have the Oculus VR Dev Kit...and Haptics Gloves are already being worked on by various folks with very promising results.

Companies to watch are Micorsoft- Hololens -Augmented Reality, Oculus VR - Virtual reality - (Facebook funded) and Magic Leap (Google Funded) (Which is doing some very interesting stuff - Holographics)

The near term future is going to be pretty wild.

Here is Magic Leap BTW:

a reply to: Vasa Croe

How easy would it be to make a Populous Version of this? Have little people walking around the sand, and you can build up and down the land to help them farm, etc. just like in the game, instead of pressing buttons you actually touch the world...

Amazing, I want one!

a reply to: Vasa Croe

That would be pretty cool. I think that if you had it the kids would have to make room so you could play, too.

Looks neat, yes, but you know... A main problem with AR or VR is shown in the video: Till now there is no real haptic feedback from these worlds, only if you use some real matter. Sand is this case. To play some warhammer games with haptical feedack till now you need: warhammer figures

What comes to my mind regarding modern 3d techniques is using your smartphone as a 3dscanner:

www.youtube.com...

a reply to: Vasa Croe

That is cool.

I recently have been viewing some HoloLens demos by microsoft. This stuff just blows my mind. Augmented Reality is totally going to change the world. Almost scary. Unlimited possibilities. Turns your home into a windows desktop...

They have the TV following you around the house. Motivational post-it notes where ever...

2015 HoloLens Demo:


MineCraft:

originally posted by: DeviantMortal
That is totally awesome! Could you guys imagine playing Warhammer 40K or War Machine with that tech?

Most of my education is built around doing this sort of stuff (it's a hard field to study though because anything taught in the classroom is already obsolete based on what the private sector is doing). For my capstone project for one of my degrees a couple years ago we set up an Oculus Rift system for two players who could look at a virtual chessboard, then we used a motion capture system with some custom built gloves we made to track each players hand in order to grab the virtual pieces and move them around. That was 4 years ago which is pretty much an eternity in fast moving tech, but does give me some idea as to what's going on.

Something like this sandbox is a bit simpler. What it's doing is scanning the sandbox to generate a height map and breaking the height map into layers. Then it takes that height map and applies a color to each layer (dark blue, light blue, dark green, light green, then red, typical topographic colors I think). Using this specific technology playing Warhammer wouldn't work very well, your pieces would register as a certain height to the overhead scanner and it would cause the location the piece is on to be illuminated as if it's higher on the map, so your boats would look green, and your guys on the field would be red. Distinguishing between the ground and a piece dynamically like this is really tricky to do in real time though not impossible.

originally posted by: MystikMushroom
I have a robot vacuum cleaner. I have an automatic cleaning litter box. We've sent men to the Moon and landed probes on Venus...and yet we can't make a real, workable, believable, functional, profitable virtual reality?

We can, I've done it, you can probably find a lot of projects out there that have but there are a lot of limitations on it and it looks more impressive than it is to use. You need to wear a mocap suit (potentially custom built), you need a mocap system (the least expensive option is $50,000), you need the mocap software (another $20,000), and then you need to build the world. Your degree of freedom when moving is also limited to the mocap area (a 20'x20' room with a 12 camera setup will get you about an 8'x8' area). And then after all of that is done there is no tactile response. You can grab a 3d object but you can never touch it, and peoples brains just don't grasp that concept very well.

Using a system like that sandbox you would have a better user experience if you project 2d pieces onto the world and then allow people to slide them around than to overlay 3d pieces that can be moved.

VALVE has a head tracking one and it also has sensors in th eroom. 15 by 15 room with motion sensors that sense your movement and adjust the environment accordingly. Its running on SOURCE 2 engine. There is also the PIXIS that comes in 3 flavors, one just senses your top part,the other the lower and the pro the complete body is able to move and be tracked. the valvbe one will tell you when you are getting close to hitting a wall though.

Microsofts hololense will most likely be a strong leader then VALVe will over take the lead.


NEITHER VALVE or PIXIS needs a full body suit. PIXIS uses straps on sensors that arent bulky as those suits.

a reply to: Vasa Croe

That is super impressive. It's amazing what people can come up with. I guess this is designed more for school environments.

originally posted by: yuppa
VALVE has a head tracking one and it also has sensors in th eroom. 15 by 15 room with motion sensors that sense your movement and adjust the environment accordingly. Its running on SOURCE 2 engine. There is also the PIXIS that comes in 3 flavors, one just senses your top part,the other the lower and the pro the complete body is able to move and be tracked. the valvbe one will tell you when you are getting close to hitting a wall though.

Microsofts hololense will most likely be a strong leader then VALVe will over take the lead.

NEITHER VALVE or PIXIS needs a full body suit. PIXIS uses straps on sensors that arent bulky as those suits.

Head tracking is relatively easy because you're already wearing an object that can be tracked. I don't know anything about the systems you specified but tracking a moving body isn't too difficult, you can extrapolate a person entirely from the head tracking (enough to determine distance to a wall or your sensor boundry at least), and you can track objects moving around. Usually this requires something like some balls that reflect IR light and the person to be wearing non reflective material, but not always. Kinect for example doesn't require any sensor to be used but that comes with another cost, Kinect can only determine position but in 3d there's also rotation which it cannot sense. Try it with their bowling game sometime to give an easy example, it cannot determine your wrist rotation when throwing the ball, it can only look for your hand position.

Straps with sensors on them lead to some issues as well. The fewer sensors on a person, the fewer points of data you have to determine what they're doing. These systems work off of triangulation. You can divide the body up into multiple triangles - each arm, torso, each leg, and head. You can also reduce almost any object to a triangle along it's base. From here you take the rotation of the triangle and the position of it to get the data on how the 3d object is being manipulated. You can even determine movement of one part by recording a change in how the triangle is scaled, for example a long flat triangle represents an outstretched arm, but if you bend the arm 90 degrees (data points on wrist, elbow, shoulder) while leaving your shoulder and elbow in the same position you get what's closer to an equilateral triangle and the object on screen can be adjusted to match.

a reply to: AnteBellum

Im actually very upset about the whole microsoft hololens ! claiming they use holographic tech , when they are really just hyping up augmented reality glasses which just focus the light onto the lens , and are not true holograms
I emailed them about it and they never replied which was a bit crap

These arent holograms they are images formed by focusing light onto a surface , however you are correct when we do have touchable holograms the way we interact with the world will change for the better especially in medicine.

holograms are different from augmented reality in that they use a different process to create an image
augmented reality is cool but no where near as cool as holography

a reply to: AnteBellum

unfortunately, this isn't a hologram but is just a projection.

Jaden

a reply to: Vasa Croe

I want one for myself. Where do i order one from?

I was slightly off earlier about the NAME of the device other than the Valve "vive" Its not a PIXIS its called the "PriorVR"

It was in a youtube video titled,"Top 5 virtual reality gadgets of the future" ,by FreezeHD. I cant get youtube to open up on this PC so i am just able to tell yall what to search for.

Its a short video under 13 mins. look at it.