SLENZ Update, No 125, August 11, 2009

FEEL THE RAINDROPS

Holographic images with

touch of  reality …

SLENZ Project joint leader Dr Clare Atkins (SL: Arwenna Stardust)  alerted me to this touch of reality in the comments at left. For those of you who don’t read comments *grin* I thought it was worth more prominence as a follow-up  to out-of-body experiments.

Displayed at SIGGRAPH 2009, which has just taken place  in New Orleans, touchable holography  was only one of  five “cool” futuristic interfaces  described by Will Knight in  Technology Review.

Knight detailed how a team of researchers at the University of Tokyo led by Hiroyuki Shinoda has developed a display that lets users “touch” objects that appear to float in space in front of them.

The virtual objects appear in mid-air thanks to an LCD and a concave mirror. The sensation of touching the objects is created using an ultrasound device (displayed at SIGGRAPH 2008) positioned below the LCD and mirror.

Now what could something like this do for virtual worlds?

But there’s  something  more …

A team from INRIA and Grenoble Universities in France demonstrated a new hyper-realistic virtual reality system called Virtualization Gate that tracked users’ movements very accurately using multiple cameras, allowing them to interact with virtual objects with new realism.

The user wore a head-mounted display (HMD) and moved through a virtual space while several cameras tracked his movement. The video shows a guy kicking over virtual vases and pushing around a virtual representation of himself. At the moment a cluster of PCs is needed to perform the necessary image capture and 3D modeling.

Thanks Arwenna for the heads-up.

And there’s still something more from SIGGRAPH for all of us who weren’t there. This preview video shows some of what we missed. *sigh* Check YouTube for further videos. Its worth it.

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