From: herbt@apollo.sarnoff.com (Herbert H Taylor III)
Subject: Re: Report from David Sarnoff Research Center.
Date: Thu, 14 Mar 91 11:17:11 EST


   
Bruce Cohen writes:

** Where can I get more information on the design, and its
** applications?  Have you published any papers?

   Two papers of interest have been (or will soon be) published. The
basic one appeared in IEEE Transactions on Consumer Electronics (sic)
in June 1988. "The Princeton Engine: A Real-time Video System
Simulator" and in short form in the proceedings of the International
Conference on Consumer Electronics, June 1988. Why a paper on a video
supercomputer first appears in a transaction on consumer electronics
is a political-soap-opera type story which I will spare this group...
A second paper of interest will soon appear in: "Advances in Neural
Information Processing Systems", Morgan Kaufmann, 1991. The paper is
titled: "Applications of Neural Networks in Video Signal Processing"
by Pearson, et al. This paper describes the real-time implementation
on the PE of neural networks trained to detect characteristic AM
impulses (hair dryer noise).

   We have a number of other reports which we will make available
through U.S. mail. Send email request to herbt@apollo.sarnoff.com. If
the number of requests is hugh it may take some time but we will
respond to everyone.

**   The room problem would be most acute in homes, schools, and offices
** where the VR system is ancillary to the major business of the place,
** and has to share the volume with other, possibly higher priority uses.

 Eventually one would like to remove the cables so you could walk free
form around the VR world. But must the VR world have a one-to-one
mapping to a fixed geometry. i.e. a step in virtual space is a step in
some physical space? Is some kind of spherical human track-ball or a
2D treadmill required to remove restrictions on boundaries?  Hmmm how
does "Infinite Virtual Worlds" sound.

**   Using a glove with distinctive markings could increase the effective
** signal-to-noise ratio of the tracking system by making the hand and finger
** position and orientation easier to distinguish from other features in the
** room.  I think the hands and fingers are the parts of the body which you
** want most to track well 

 This is what I had in mind - possibly even allowing the glove to be
"wireless". There is also the possibility of going gloveless using IR.
We have already experimented with the use of an IR camara to segment
"hot" regions. The face and hands are easy to distinguish from the
rest of the world because they look "hot". The IR image can be
segmented to form a mask on the monochrome image. We can also produce
a contour map of the body (using histogram) which enables texture-like
features to be discriminated.

  Herb Taylor