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.
Re:Oh no money for software and content! (Score:3, Informative)
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
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.
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
Re:Oh no money for software and content! (Score:3, Informative)
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 recognition software has been around for many years, you'd think a webcam could determine where you are in the room and change the image based on that alone without a IR necklace. Logitech added face tracking to their webcams in 2005 [beststuff.com] and people were playing with it on Youtube in 2006 [youtube.com]. If there's multiple people it should be able to change according to whoever's closest and looking at the windows. Here's a example from 2008 of using a webcam for the same effect without giant IR necklaces. [youtube.com] Here's one you can test at home yourself if you have webcam. [solidsmack.com]
When I saw the video that's what I thought he had done, I thought it was just watching the user. Requiring a IR necklace made this absolutely not impressive because any day someone will make a webcam version.
I'm even less impressed that this guy's system requires a $2,000 Apple Mac Pro running a NVIDIA GeForce GT 120 which is Apple's version of 2008's low-budget Geforce 9500 GT, [xi0.info] and is a bit slower than a ATI 4670 [insidehw.com] for those of you more familiar with ATI. Not high end graphics folks, and making people buy a $2,000 system when you could probably suffice with a PC under $500 is ridiculous, and being Mac based means this will remain expensive for several years while a PC version would continue to drop.
Also, don't plasma screens suffer from screen burn-in? [wikipedia.org] Why is this guy running basically static images for hours on two 46" plasma screens?
Re:Oh no money for software and content! (Score:3, Informative)
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].