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.
$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.
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.
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.
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.