From: Mark Billinghurst Subject: Re: TECH: "Reality" in VR Date: 4 Oct 1995 16:40:49 GMT Organization: University of Washington From: Mark Billinghurst Dave Vance <74312.1733@CompuServe.COM> wrote: >From: Dave Vance <74312.1733@CompuServe.COM> > >Can someone settle a bet for me? I'd like to know if current >processing and storage capabilities support storing and viewing >3D images of real-life objects in VR. Or, if not, what is the >limiting factor? I'm not sure about this - but given enough processing power very photorealistic images can be seen. At SIGGRAPH this year SGI used a rack of machines to do a photoreal interactive flythrough of a house. Very impressive, but it used over a million dollars worth of computers ! >Also, can VR glasses be used to play back a 360 degree video? >I.e., can you use the head-tracking capabilities to view a video >shot in 360 degrees, in the same way as you could watch a normal >video shot with a standard FOV on a 2D screen? That answer to this is yes. There's a company called Dodeca which seamlessly joins the video streams from 6 cameras placed around a dodecahedron to produce a hemispheric video that can be viewed in VR glasses with headtracking. It's very impressive. The had a demo at SIGGRAPH of a basketball game. When you put on the VR glasses you were in the centre of the action but you could look in any direction and have the view change accordingly. Pretty neat considering this was video NOT computer graphics.. They weren't selling their system, but people could hire their services to produce video. But it'll be only a matter of time before the technology becomes as commonplace as QuickTime VR. Hope this answers your questions.. Mark +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Mark Billinghurst | Human Interface Technology Laboratory grof@hitl.washington.edu | University of Washington, Box 352-142 fax: +1-206-543-5380 | Seattle, WA 98195