DescentBB

Is it possible to have virtual reality goggles simulate looking at a large monitor? Basically your desktop would wrap around you. As you turned your head the desktop would stay fixed as if mounted to walls, six feet away. This seems obvious, so I'm guessing its already been done, but I can't find it anywhere.

Yes.

its kinda pointless.

What's the problem?

The problem is having a absurdly large desktop, then requiring heavy headgear to use it.

Virtual desktop spaces work much, much better.

It has to be heavy headgear?

Youd think someone would have hacked it with like, a couple of wiimotes duct taped to a helmet with some kind of display goggles attached.

In a way without the use of headgear my simpit works in that way, I use trackir and 4 monitors. The 3 monitors on the top are an eyefinity group which translates to appear as 1 large monitor with brezel compensation (4044x1024) which is used as a virtual cockpit. The the fourth monitor is used as a static instrument panel (1680x1050) with direct input and real time updates to the data. I had toyed with the idea of virtual glasses but the resolution is subpar.

The way I see it the A-10 is the predecessor of the Pyro-GX



It's a little more complicated than that as far as implementation goes, but the result is what I described above. Games used DCS A-10C/AK-50/Flaming Cliffs 2 and Microsoft FSX all running from the same machine. In order to use the video from the virtual instruments on the fourth monitor with Helios running an overlay that translates cockpit data and input functions by using the mouse (touchscreen to replace shortly). For other games and simulators I used the second machine in the pit that is connected to the VGA input on the lower monitor and display standard virtual panels that do not require video feed or flightplan/traffic software ... Easy as 1 button on the display to switch between the computers and navigate using input director.

Next is 3 projectors and a wrap around screen

[ Post made via iPhone ]

Wow... touch screens with flight sim controls and projectors? I know that's for later additions, but you should have your own tv show, "Sons of U.I." or something.

A headtracker can turn your screen into what iirc is called a "PORTAL" into your virtual desktop.
Basically your screen becomes like a window, which you naturally move your head to look through, to see the large virtual room on the other side.
The bigger the screen and the higher the resolution (or tie multiple screens together, like Bubba has done), the better the result.

JohnnyLee describes this pretty well in this vid, how he's waving that picture frame around. And you soon get to see first hand what he's talking about when it starts tracking the camera.
[youtube]Jd3-eiid-Uw[/youtube]

I don't think i've yet seen anyone do a desktop yet, which is frustrating because it would be trivial to pull it off. Mind you we've been saying that for decades now, common-place VR has been constantly "just around the corner" for 20 years >:(
I think if we looked around enough we'd find someone who's done it and uploaded pics/vids somewhere.


One thing you have to remember is that your desktop's real resolution (ie: apparent to your eyes) will technically never be greater than what your headset or monitor can handle. The VR will trick you into thinking otherwise, and that's fine, it's the point, but you're sacrificing visual acuity to maintain the illusion. In real life your eyes may be able to distinguish individual pixels on an HD (or greater) monitor as you walk around your room, seeing it from any angle and even from some distance - but when you're simulating that walk-around from within a VR headset, distant things will be blurred.
What i'm saying is that even though you may have an UHDTV 8K virtual desktop which is meters long - due to your VR goggles being a much lower resolution, you will probably have to zoom right up to each individual open window to be able to read what's written on it. Which can somewhat defeat the purpose, depending on how you plan on using it. (ie: it can actually slow your computing experience down having to manually zoom around so much, it can be a bother)
But it IS a wonderful feeling of immersion, and hell yeah i'd want it.

For VR goggles, they'll find ways on improving resolution, just as the did with smartphones. LIFE FINDS A WAY! But that VR trick will help.

As for the tv, that's cool! It might be handy for 3d modeling, since i'm always rotating my model to get a better sense of what shape it's taking.

If there's any doubt left.. there's the occulus.

viewtopic.php?f=8&t=19670

Isaac wrote:For VR goggles, they'll find ways on improving resolution, just as the did with smartphones. LIFE FINDS A WAY! But that VR trick will help.

As for the tv, that's cool! It might be handy for 3d modeling, since i'm always rotating my model to get a better sense of what shape it's taking.

What's super duper great about it is that it can be done with hardware that most people already have, it can be done with merely a webcam tracking your head position. There's quite likely plenty of free OpenCV type software that'll enable that.

I wonder what the human eye's maximum discernible resolution is. Once we get VR displays with that resolution we'll finally have a good excuse to stop and relax .

i've been kicking around ideas for tiny super-high-resolution displays that move to be constantly infront of your eyes at all times (ie: it'd be coupled with really fast eye-tracking and either motors or some kinda MEMS mirror system. But it's hard beans figuring out exactly how it could be pulled off.
The idea is that since in humans only our central vision is high clarity, then why waste large high resolution displays to feed photons to your ENTIRE eye? All you really need is to take good care of the central vision, you can use any cheap low resolution display for the rest of your field of view. The problem is that you need to be able to follow the really fast saccades of the eye, and that's no easy task, coz they're so fast! It inevitably makes me wonder if it'd be easier/cheaper to just use a LARGE non-moving super-high-res display for the whole eye (ie: the normal technological evolution that VR headsets are following). But damnit - it's just such a tantalising engineering problem i can't stop thinking about it.

This was helpful http://xkcd.com/1080/

Maybe, for something mounted right over the eye, we don't need a higher resolution. We can use low-resolution, but have a high frame rate that alternates between different nearby pixels. The goal would be to trick the eye into seeing a higher resolution. The only thing required would be a small shift in the display, so that the new instance would show the pixels in a new location. It probably means the display would be spinning, over the iris, which would mean it would have to be very small.

So if the eye is at 60 FPS (average) then to double the resolution show two overlapping frames using the same pixels 60 out of the 120 frames. Triple the res? 180 frames per second, with the screen cycling between 3 frames.

The advantage would be allowing each eye display to be much smaller.

Pretty sure it'll be cheaper and more practical just to use a finer dot pitch.

Sirius wrote:Pretty sure it'll be cheaper and more practical just to use a finer dot pitch.

http://www.youtube.com/embed/zfbK_dbsCu0?autoplay=1

Isaac wrote:Maybe, for something mounted right over the eye, we don't need a higher resolution. We can use low-resolution, but have a high frame rate that alternates between different nearby pixels. The goal would be to trick the eye into seeing a higher resolution. The only thing required would be a small shift in the display, so that the new instance would show the pixels in a new location. It probably means the display would be spinning, over the iris, which would mean it would have to be very small.

So if the eye is at 60 FPS (average) then to double the resolution show two overlapping frames using the same pixels 60 out of the 120 frames. Triple the res? 180 frames per second, with the screen cycling between 3 frames.

The advantage would be allowing each eye display to be much smaller.

Ah, i getcha. It's like looking through a fly-screened window. If you stay still the image looks pixelated, but if you constantly move your head you can get a kindof sub-pixel resolution which improves your vision considerably. It plays on your brain's persistence_of_vision - mentally piecing together a lot of low resolution pixels to form a higher resolution image.

A while back I was thinking about a vibrating camera CCD for similar reasons.
But I was thinking that rather than rotating, it could be done with vibrations caused by simple crystal oscillators. Very small, very efficient afaik.
(a problem with spinning around the iris would be that the central vision would have the least resolution gain, and the outer rings would have the most, which is somewhat opposite to what you want, but certainly not a deal breaker).
Oh, and now that i think of it, can LCD screens cycle that fast without leaving ghost trails? Coz we're talking some superfast cycling
Actually this whole idea is probably a prettygood way of testing LCD screens cycling speed and ghosting i wonder if there's videos of this
i know there's videos of arrays of spinning LEDs, but i dunno about LCDs

LCDs are entirely too slow for something like that and it is more or less physically impossible for them to become fast enough, only LEDs are that fast (even phosphors can't keep up with LEDs).

This is mostly because LCDs are multicolored filters that block out light which is sent through them in order to change the picture to the desired colors, while phosphors and LEDs directly emit light.

hmm. Are tiny LED displays a thing we could use?

BUBBALOU wrote:In a way without the use of headgear my simpit works in that way, I use trackir and 4 monitors. The 3 monitors on the top are an eyefinity group which translates to appear as 1 large monitor with brezel compensation (4044x1024) which is used as a virtual cockpit. The the fourth monitor is used as a static instrument panel (1680x1050) with direct input and real time updates to the data. I had toyed with the idea of virtual glasses but the resolution is subpar.

The way I see it the A-10 is the predecessor of the Pyro-GX



It's a little more complicated than that as far as implementation goes, but the result is what I described above. Games used DCS A-10C/AK-50/Flaming Cliffs 2 and Microsoft FSX all running from the same machine. In order to use the video from the virtual instruments on the fourth monitor with Helios running an overlay that translates cockpit data and input functions by using the mouse (touchscreen to replace shortly). For other games and simulators I used the second machine in the pit that is connected to the VGA input on the lower monitor and display standard virtual panels that do not require video feed or flightplan/traffic software ... Easy as 1 button on the display to switch between the computers and navigate using input director.

Next is 3 projectors and a wrap around screen

[ Post made via iPhone ]

I'm just plain jealous of your setup.

Ferno wrote:If there's any doubt left.. there's the occulus.

viewtopic.php?f=8&t=19670

I think they mention Suncho's dad at 26:24 in this talk...

[youtube]8gaqQdyfAz8[/youtube]