How To Build a Winscape 161
hoagaboom writes "You take your plasma TVs, mix them with a healthy dose of OpenGL and a dash of Wii Remote. Bake for a year and enjoy something called a Winscape." Although I'm not sure I'm quite willing to wear a special necklace to make the effect work, it's a super sweet little project, although they want $10 for the software and then $10 for many of the actual video loops.
Finally (Score:5, Funny)
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The first one that comes to mind would be to mess with the head of a drunken one night stand. Set the video loop to Paris and then watch their face when they walk in... What, you don't remember flying to Paris with me last night? Man, you were drunker than I thought.
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Don't forget to get an extra water chip.
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Now my mom's basement will be perfect
As a fresh father (Score:2, Funny)
..let me say that the baby in the video is really cute. Not as cute as my baby boy, but still, not trailing far behind.
Way more fun than a techie gadget such as fake windows.
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and edible too, when you get bored of them.
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Fricasseed? Or peeled and boiled?
Where's my copy of Dean Swift's cookbook?
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Whoever modded that "troll" was either childless or stupid. Someone please correct that moderation (you can mod me offtopic, I have karma to spare)
Re:As a fresh father (Score:5, Funny)
This is Slashdot. We’re all childless, most of us are stupid, and anyone who claims otherwise is trolling. Hence the mod.
The preceding comment was a joke.
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If anything, I beat you at "fresher": 10 weeks :)
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10 weeks at room temperature? Meh.
I flash-froze mine the day I got him, so he's as fresh as the day he was born.
Wait, was that my out-loud voice?
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4 Grandparents -> 2 Parents -> 1 child.
Between me, my wife and our parents, we are responsible for a reduction of population* by 4x over 3 generations.
If that doesn't give me 'population boom smug points' I don't know what does.
*Obviously only if everyone was to do this.
The only way we could do better is to have no kids and then if everyone did this, byebye human race.
Tom...
world population not really a problem (Score:2)
Oh no money for software and content! (Score:5, Funny)
Well, nothing is stopping you from making your own if you want to save $20, after spending several thousand on the hardware. Actually I suppose you could just engineer your own plasma screens too. Screw you patents! Stick it to the man!
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I'm sure if you were building the thing from scratch you would probably capture your own footage too.
At first, I was thinking "if it's convenient to get a view of the Eiffel Tower (or some other landmark), why do you need this?"
Then I realized, this could be a nice way to replace your view of that adjacent highrise in your apartment in Paris (or wherever the heck you live) without being pretentious (hey, come to my apartment in Omaha, my window looks over the Rhine...)
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I agree, $10 is reasonable. My problem is you have to wear a giant ugly IR-emitting necklace for the system to recognize you. Gee, a computer that can track a IR-emitting necklace? That's 1990s tech my friend. Facial
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I don't know (or particularly care) about burn in, but what did occur to me was "how well is the screen going to internally dissipate and relocate heat when they are stood up on end?" I know that a non-trivial number of screens are mounted upside-down (when hung from ceilings, etc), but I don't recall having ever seen a consumer TV mounted in "portrait mode". I wonder if
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Well, some facial recognition software is capable of telling apart faces/identifying one individual. I think iPhoto does it, for one thing. If that's not feasible, you could simply do the trick for the first person to enter the room, and try to track him/her as long as possible (allowing for a certain amount of time where the face is not detected). Still a nice alternative or a fallback if that IR jewelry isn't available.
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Did you stop reading after you got to that sentence? Because the very next sentence says: " If there's multiple people it should be able to change according to whoever's closest and looking at the windows."
I also wrote that Logitech has been making facial recognition software that follows your face since 2005 [beststuff.com] so go ask them how the 5 yr old software with the lowly Pentium 4 1 [amazon.com]
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Yeah, I'm betting that baby you need to control the screen is pretty expensive.
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Babies to wear the sensor cost a lot more than just several thousands of dollars, they're expensive hardware!
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Patents only apply if you want to sell it. They mean nothing if you only want to build your own plasma screens.
That is absolutely not true. You might not get sued for patent infringement because you're an insolvent nobody and the damages won't be worth the cost of the litigation, but you infringe a patent if you make, sell, offer to sell, use, or import something that is covered by the claims. 35 U.S.C. 271 [cornell.edu].
$20 is cheap! (Score:4, Interesting)
Why on earth are you whining about a $20 price? People spend plenty more on screensavers.
Totally worth it, and negligible when considering the cost of the rest of the hardware.
I expect that an improvement can be done with webcam tracking, obviously for one viewer at a time.
It's not the money (Score:5, Funny)
I mean, do you rent it? Adopt it? Make your own? - which means getting a woman...
Nah, this is just waaaayyy too difficult!
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In a pinch, a pillow with a cantaloupe set atop will double for the baby.
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In a pinch, a pillow with a cantaloupe set atop will double for the baby.
That works for the getting a woman issue too...
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It's not the $20! It's the baby! Getting a baby to hang the motion tracking device on will be an issue.
I mean, do you rent it? Adopt it? Make your own? - which means getting a woman...
It's the chicken and egg problem*. If you are pushing a baby in a stroller in a supermarket, women will come up and talk to you. I remember thinking when my kids were babies and I took them to the store "damn, why didn't I have one of these when I was single?"
* the egg came first.
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It's not the $20! It's the baby! Getting a baby to hang the motion tracking device on will be an issue. I mean, do you rent it? Adopt it? Make your own? - which means getting a woman...
It's the chicken and egg problem*. If you are pushing a baby in a stroller in a supermarket, women will come up and talk to you. I remember thinking when my kids were babies and I took them to the store "damn, why didn't I have one of these when I was single?"
* the egg came first.
And then what? Ask them, "Do you want to help me make another one?"
I don't know. I'm just curious.
Nope (Score:2)
They like men with babies because it means they don't have to do it anymore. Apparently child-birth is a bit inconvenient or something. I don't know. Women eh, always bitching about trivial things.
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They like men with babies because it means they don't have to do it anymore. Apparently child-birth is a bit inconvenient or something. I don't know. Women eh, always bitching about trivial things.
I just told everyone my wife was smuggling a watermelon.
She said dealing with me made dealing with the pregnancy seem a lot easier.
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Bug report closed. Reason: Failed to reproduce.
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Why on earth are you whining about a $20 price? People spend plenty more on screensavers.
Yeah, and people put on their makeup while driving, and try to siphon gasoline with a vaccuum cleaner. These are the sort of people who spend twenty bucks on a screensaver.
Totally worth it
Worth it? Hey, pay attention to your driving instead of posting to slashdot!
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I know, right?
It's trivial to get free screen savers from just about any website, I see the flashing ads all the time.
Once you've downloaded it, you just need to click the box to give it permission to run. It's just a screensaver, and the website the ad took me to looks really good, like they hired a professional to make it. They sell screensavers too, so they're a legitimate
Yes (Score:4, Funny)
Slashdot nerds rejoice (Score:5, Funny)
Now you can leave your mom's basement, without ever leaving your mom's basement.
Get rid of the Necklace... (Score:3, Insightful)
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They don't expect you to do that. That part is a gimmick feature for parties or something. Of course, though, without that it's just a really expensive digital picture frame.
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it's just a really expensive digital picture frame
Speaking of which, I wonder how much less it would cost if they used a Linux box and free software?
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You’re an idiot.
The PC/MAC came with Windows or OSX Pre-installed (I think he mentioned that it was a OSX, but its the same either way). He paid for that with the cost of the hardware, and would have even had he chosen to later install linux.
He could have built his own computer. No OEM license fee for an OS whatsoever.
He wrote the software that is used to do tracking and display modification, so that cost the same (his time) regardless of platform.
He’s selling the kit, so by writing the software for OS X, he’s locked everyone who purchases the kit into Apple’s over-priced hardware. Hardware that comes with OS X installed, which is what he is using, is going to be significantly more expensive than similar hardware that came with Windows installed (simply because you have to buy it from Apple).
and would have then would have had to use the time to install linux on the PC/MAC and possibly learn the dev environment of a new system
BOO HOO.
I was never suggesting that he spec
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The kit is the displays and plans for the in-wall frames, if I read the page correctly.
You provide your own MacOS X (10.5 or better) based computer. No one is forcing you to use his software, or buy a new Mac. You could Hackintosh it, or buy an older Mac off Craigslist (I have a G4 running 10.5 I got for $100.) You could write your own software for Linux, or Windows, or OS/2, or Haiku, then come back and submit your cool software to /. and crow about how much more open and free-er your software is than t
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You provide your own MacOS X (10.5 or better) based computer.
Right.
You could Hackintosh it
Illegal, according to Apple.
or buy an older Mac off Craigslist
...would it run it? I’m guessing cropping an HD video loop (Quicktime, what’s more) live and running it on two monitors takes a fair amount of processing power, but I could be wrong.
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Actually, I (the person originally questioning how much could be saved by using Linux, in case you missed something) was always referring to the $2500-$3000 “kit” that the guy is going to be producing, which TFA refers to.
So... let me restate my question.
“I wonder how much less this kit would cost if they used Linux and free software instead of Apple hardware and OS X?”
And yes, anyone who answers that with “actually, it would cost the same... no, in fact it would cost more
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the article was about THIS device, with only a mention of a potential future commercial offering
Obvious slashvertisement wasn’t obvious?
Well, I thought so... sorry if I wasn’t clear.
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P.S. I’m assuming the kit does include the computer it runs on. Unless you have a mac sitting around that will run the thing, you will have to buy one... and although it never specifically says that the workstation must be dedicated to running this, I somewhat suspect it.
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Don't know how it will work with multiple people though.
Project the appropriate image for each person directly onto his or her retina. Duh.
I see a few huge flaws (Score:4, Interesting)
It would be fine for one person, but the perspective will only be for the person wearing the dorky necklace. It will be wierd and jarring for anyone else. "Waking up in the same place is boring" but more boring would be putting the thing on before you perk your coffee. Even putting on glasses was a pain in the ass thirty years after I started wearing them at age six, and they were totally necessary; I was blind without them. Nobody is going to get up and put that thing on first thing in the morning, especially after the novelty wears off.
Also, prior art -- Total Recall
Re:I see a few huge flaws (Score:5, Interesting)
It would be fine for one person, but the perspective will only be for the person wearing the dorky necklace. It will be wierd and jarring for anyone else. "Waking up in the same place is boring" but more boring would be putting the thing on before you perk your coffee. Even putting on glasses was a pain in the ass thirty years after I started wearing them at age six, and they were totally necessary; I was blind without them. Nobody is going to get up and put that thing on first thing in the morning, especially after the novelty wears off.
Also, prior art -- Total Recall
Simple solution: if you are putting on your glasses every morning, then put a small reflector on the front, and bathe the room in IR. Works like a charm for head-sensing camera-based systems like TrackIR. If you habitually wear glasses, then you are, in fact, at a huge advantage for this sort of device, because there's zero impact to your daily routine, and only upside. Moreover, as long as you leave it on, it will continue to work every morning. Everyone else will have to remember to put something on, which gets to be a pain, and thus because it is not necessary, the neato-keeno device evenutaly will be forgotten or ignored.
Mod this one up. (Score:2)
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if you are putting on your glasses every morning, then put a small reflector on the front
While this would work, I can only imagine what people who do this will look like on the beach or outside in the sunlight in general. Can you imagine a tour guide trying to give a presentation with 20 bright spots of light shining him in the eyes? My eyes! My eyes!
People would sparkle in the light like second-rate vampires. So uncool.
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It would only have to reflect IR.
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Simple solution: if you are putting on your glasses every morning, then put a small reflector on the front
Yes, that would work. Fortunately for me it wouldn't work for me, as I had my nearsightedness and age-related farsightedness surgically corrected. God but I love technology! Glasses suck, I'm glad to be rid of them.
But if your IR lamp was bright enough and your IR reciever sensitive enough, light reflected off your eyeballs would work.
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You know, I was going to do a somewhat similar project... With a baseball cap. Put the IR source BEHIND the WII remote, and get a baseball cap or similar with a small IR reflective dot on it (front and back, for those who still want to look like Fred Durst). Blammo, no batteries around your neck. The only issue would be other IR reflective surfaces you might be wearing.
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You know, I was going to do a somewhat similar project... With a baseball cap. Put the IR source BEHIND the WII remote, and get a baseball cap or similar with a small IR reflective dot on it (front and back, for those who still want to look like Fred Durst). Blammo, no batteries around your neck. The only issue would be other IR reflective surfaces you might be wearing.
It is nearly always advisable to look at what other efforts have done before embarking on a project. The TrackIR Pro has a doodad with three reflectors on it that clips to the user's baseball hat. The three reflectors are in known physical relation to each other, which allows the TrackIR software to extract head position, but it might also be used (I'm speculating at this point) to eliminate spurious inputs by only paying attention to reflections that are in a physically plausible configuration given the
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Not flaws if you had bothered to read the text below the video. They don't expect you to always wear the tracking necklace. It is just a novelty item they included.
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Video forum discussion (Score:2)
This concept has been discussed in several video forums. Turning your HDTV into a window to somewhere else [dvfreelancer.com]. Along with fish tanks, fire places and other perspective shots.
But this goes way beyond those simple ideas. The perspective tracker is very clever, but that and building it into the wall adds cost and complexity. I think a simple screen saver type loop would be good enough for most people. Just to keep your TV from being a big, black hole in your living room.
Still, good work packaging a simpl
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The perspective tracker is very clever, but that and building it into the wall adds cost and complexity.
You wouldn't have to build it into the wall, you could mount it with screws or nails. No big deal.
I think a simple screen saver type loop would be good enough for most people. Just to keep your TV from being a big, black hole in your living room.
My TV's screen saver is a picture of a black cat in a coal chute at midnight on a cloudy, moonless December. And it's free!
Missing cost.... (Score:2)
$10,000 for hardware and other aspects.
sorry, not worth it. Neat, but until I wipe my bum with $100.00 bills I'ts not worth it.
Not the first, but still better than the first (Score:2, Informative)
In Holland we have a saying; Better well-stolen than poorly made up. In this case, this guy beat them to the idea, but these guys made a better looking use for it; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jd3-eiid-Uw
Deja-vu, all over again... (Score:1)
been there, done that.
3D ? (Score:2)
Might look nice in the video. In a real installation, I fear the human eyes are just too good, and will quickly tell you that while that may seem like the golden gate bridge outside, it has no depth, and thus is more likely to be a 2D image than a 3D reality.
Cool Tech..but (Score:2)
Nothing says "I'm always going to live alone" more then this.
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Nothing says "I'm always going to live alone" more then this.
Indeed. The baby was clearly a rental from Babies R Us. Or an automaton. I, for one, welcome our new automa... aw, skip it.
OMG (Score:2)
Disney has fake portals on cruise ships (Score:2)
Windows (Score:2)
Small steps, people (Score:2)
Small steps here, people. We already have face tracking. They'll go from the Wiimote to head tracking cameras pretty quickly and you won't need to wear anything special to make it work. Give it time.
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Still for only one person, though, until they get TVs that can display entirely different pictures to different viewers based on their viewing angle.
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Or since we're talking about science fiction tech, get out that 1MHz refresh rate monitor and equally sensitive shutter glasses; 16384 distinct viewers should be enough for everyone
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Right, because that's practical :D
I'll stick with one person wearing a necklace, thanks ;)
No anti-Windows comments? (Score:2)
Chthulu be praised! (Score:2)
When I first saw this headline, I immediately thought, "Oh, NO! Billgatus of Borg has finally assimilated /.!"
Then I realized that the view was from the Marin headlands, not Redmond.
Very promising (Score:2)
Combine this with something like Project Natal so that the window could track the person and update the display depending on where they were and you'd have a near-perfect virtual window. Of course, I don't know how it would handle showing multiple people different views. Still, given some more refinement, you could have a frame that you hang on the wall that includes a screen, tracking hardware, and a specially designed computer to display the videos, etc. Design it right and you could extend it for othe
Wendover, NV (Score:2)
This reminds me of the HD plasma screens stuck all over the three Peppermill-owned casinos in Wendover, NV.
Gives you pretty scenes to look at while you wait for things or gamble with grandma.
Starship Simulator (Score:2)
This will be a great tech to use for me to build a starship simulator.
I could make a 10-Forward room in my house that looks like the one on Star Trek.
No depth information! (Score:2)
This kind of technology only looks cool, when you watch in on a 2D screen.
But as soon as you see in in reality, before you, it’s very disappointing and kinda lame and pointless.
It’s amazing how many people can’t tell the difference between real 3D, stereo 2D or just this very simplistic adaptive mono 2D imagery...
It's been done (Score:2)
I've seen this before, and with less clunky head trackers.
The tracker update rate has to be really fast, and the lag very low, or the effect breaks down. The fact that it's not stereoscopic, though, doesn't matter for distant scenes, like the Golden Gate Bridge shown. For the "aquarium", though, that will be a problem.
Working on a very similar project (Score:3, Interesting)
I've been working on a slightly more ambitious (but still a ways off!) similar project, see http://jonathanclark.com. Initially I tried using a wiimote, but found it has a extremely limited coverage area and accuracy. If you move a few feet out of a sweet spot it will stop working, also the wiimote has a lot of noise in it's samples so you end up having to smooth the samples - but this introduces a lot of latency which destroys the illusion. On the low-cost end, the TrackIR system works a lot better (faster, more accurate samples). I have a demo using TrackIR posted here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tzKTJM5T0us&feature=player_embedded
TrackIR also has a limited area it can work with, so now I've moved to using OptiTrack which gets pricer but can cover fairly large areas (at least a small room).
One other issue I found is that flat video doesn't look entirely convincing because motion parallax should occur within a frame - for example, when you move left to right, the bridge and the water behind it should move at different speeds. To help address this, I'm currently trying to create a depth-map per video frame and convert that depth map into a mesh which the video is mapped onto. To start, I'm drawing the depth map by hand (should be ok if objects don't move much), but I'd like to create it automatically by filming from multiple angles and using feature point extraction to estimate the depth for every frame automatically.
Second Life client (Score:2)
It should be possible to make a Second Life viewer that works like this.
It may even include particle filtering, so, say, attack of the flying penises will look like a snowstorm.
Total Recall (Score:2)
i'm disappointed that i haven't seen anyone mention Total Recall in this thread.
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I think it’s more that it costs $2000-$3000 to begin with and then they nickel-and-dime you on the software and video loops.
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Straight from TFA...
So yeah. Apparently most of the time you’d want to just have it sit there displaying its static image or video loop but not tracking your movements.
Re:The effect would be weird (Score:5, Informative)
I worked in a lab doing stereo vision research once. There's a lot more than stereopsis going on in depth perception. About 5% of the general population does not have stereopsis; 10% at age 65 and generally increasing thereafter. Often people who have this condition don't even know it.
The research I assisted on was on the impact of cognitive load on peripheral vision acuity (answer: none that we could find), but I also tinkered with stereograms. It turns out you can make them out of flat pictures by presenting disparate shadows to each eye. I got so good at looking at sterograms I didn't need a streoscope. I could look at a strip of Lunar photos from the Ranger mission and merge them into stereo images without any optical assistance.
In any case real world stereopsis only works at close range -- 25 meters or so is the max. As you approach that limit other cues become more important, including movement parallax, which is what this system exploits. If you looked at an image of something apparently fifty feet away or so, the fact that moving from side to side affects its apparent position and moving forward and back affects its size has a much stronger impact on your perception of depth and distance than stereopsis, even though stereopsis is theoretically operational at this distance. I'd bet the virtual object's distance would have to be quite close, say four meters or less, before your brain really starts to object.
So as far as a vista from your window -- say a view of the Golden Gate bridge -- stereopsis has absolutely no effect at all on the perception of 3D.
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In any case real world stereopsis only works at close range -- 25 meters or so is the max. As you approach that limit other cues become more important, including movement parallax, which is what this system exploits.
It’s not that far away though... it’s relatively close to you, hanging on the wall. There’s a flat, vertical surface with an image on it. Regardless of how flat the image inside the window would look (as you said... at a distance, it would look relatively flat so long as you didn’t move your head), the window would still look like a hole in the wall because the wall is much closer.
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I should have clarified... a real window will look like a hole in the wall (because it is). This, on the other hand, is at the same distance as the rest of the wall, and would look not only flat but also close.
It was probably obvious what I meant but I should have stated it more clearly...
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For an example to back up our point: think skyboxes in video games. After a certain ditance away you would cease to notice any of the depth of an image, especially if your reference point is essentially fixed. This system simulates a skybox with 2D textures (and could theoretically have closer 3D objects as well) outside your window, which for the most part is good enough.
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Hence the reason why the whole 3D thing is and will be nothing more than a gimmick.
latency = veritgo (Score:3, Interesting)
The thing is, it still wouldn't look 3D, even if it had head tracking. It would be quite a weird effect for you to move and be able to look around but it would still be flat.
because the objects are at a distance you won't have any binocular ability so it will look just fine in 3D. The real weirdness is going to be latency. you move your head and the scene lags. It will give you the sensation you are falling over or falling into the scene.
Nice party joke if you don't mind cleaning up vomit.
Re:The effect would be weird (Score:5, Informative)
I've done this on a 8ft projector screen with Johny Chung Lee's original Wii head tracking mod, and I can assure you, the moment you move your head and the display updates, your brain is immediately fooled into seeing 3D.
Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jd3-eiid-Uw [youtube.com]
-Jar
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quite the opposite (Score:2)
Motion is a strong cue for 3D. Furthermore, stereo vision doesn't really work beyond a few yards anyway.
The real problem with these kinds of setups (and why you don't see them more) is that they only work for one person at a time.
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But this would actuall create a real 3D expierence, versus a sterio vision appearance of depth.
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Now, if I could only get another 99 people to put in their two cents, I could buy the software! Whereever would I find a site where so many people would be willing to voice their opinions. :)
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Yes. "You are watching The Scenery Channel." Except it resembled a modern front-projection screen covering an actual window, but no clear indication of a projector.