Virtual Reality

246 Articles

Third Person Perspective Is Guaranteed To Mess With Your Senses

July 2, 2014 by 29 Comments

3rd person oculus rift

Third person video games are never really that realistic — you get a much wider range of vision, you can typically see around things your character can’t actually see… the list goes on. But what would it be like to have a third person perspective, in real life?

That’s exactly what some hackers in Poland decided to do! This is their Real World Third Person Perspective VR / AR Experiment. It makes use of an Oculus Rift, two GoPros, a microprocessor and a few servo motors. It’s essentially a glorified camera on a stick that you wear as a backpack, but nonetheless it has a really cool effect.

The project was built in under 2 days to get into the tight deadline for Intel’s Wearable contest, which has an impressive prize list, including a grand prize of $500,000 for business development! They didn’t place, but it’s still a Hack a Day worthy project!

Check it out!

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Virtual Physical Reality With Kintinuous And An Oculus Rift

June 21, 2014 by 3 Comments

oculus

The Kinect has long been able to create realistic 3D models of real, physical spaces. Combining these Kinect-mapped spaces with an Oculus Rift is something brand new entirely.

[Thomas] and his fellow compatriots within the Kintinuous project are modeling an office space with the old XBox 360 Kinect’s RGB+D sensors. then using an Oculus Rift to inhabit that space. They’re not using the internal IMU in the Oculus to position the camera in the virtual space, either: they’re using live depth sensing from the Kinect to feed the Rift screens.

While Kintinuous is very, very good at mapping large-scale spaces, the software itself if locked up behind some copyright concerns the authors and devs don’t have control over. This doesn’t mean the techniques behind Kintinuous are locked up, however: anyone is free to read the papers (here’s one, and another, PDF of course) and re-implement Kintinuous as an open source project. That’s something that would be really cool, and we’d encourage anyone with a bit of experience with point clouds to give it a shot.

Video below.

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Oculus Rift + Head Tracking = The Ultimate Drone Experience

June 18, 2014 by 26 Comments

oculus rift quad

What happens when you strap a stereoscopic camera onto a drone and transmit the video feed directly to your Oculus Rift? A pretty amazing experience, that’s what!

Several students from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology recently finished a term project dubbed Oculus FPV. In it, [Erik Hals], [Jacob Prescott], [Mats Svensson], and [Mads Wilthil] succeeded in combining virtual reality, a head mounted display, and a UAV for a great result.

Drones with cameras are the next big step in search and rescue, remote inspection, and many other use cases in other environments that are typically inaccessible for a human to poke around. What we really like about this project is they also mounted the stereoscopic cameras on a gimbal, allowing for full head movement — this means the pilot can “park” (read “hover”) his drone in remote locations, and then look around, without having to worry about performing complex aerial acrobatics to get the right camera angle.

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Birdly, The Virtual Reality Simulator Guaranteed To Wear You Out

June 17, 2014 by 32 Comments

birdly

Have you ever dreamed of being able to fly like a bird? Sadly, we’re just too heavy with our solid bones and fatty tissues – but now there’s a simulator called Birdly which will give you the experience you crave!

The Swiss team, consisting of [Max Rheiner], [Fabien Troxler], [Thomas Tobler] and [Thomas Erdin] wanted to build a simulator never done before – one that will simulate flapping your wings and actually flying around. They’re using the Oculus Rift to complete the visual experience, and a rather unique simulator chair that you lie face down on. It features two mechanical wings that you strap your hands into, with gas springs to provide resistance – sensors measure the stroke and power of your “flap”, relaying the information to the computer in order to control your virtual wings. You can also lean in any direction, allowing for fancy bird acrobatics.

A large fan directly mounted off the front helps to make the experience feel even more real, as you fly around in the virtual world. They say it also includes olfactoric feedback, which presents different scents to you, representative of where you are in the virtual world — we’re not too sure how that works, but it sounds pretty awesome!

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Home Made Oculus Rift

OpenVR: Building An Oculus Rift For Only $150

June 13, 2014 by 39 Comments

The Oculus Rift is a really cool piece of kit, but with its future held in the grasp of Facebook, who knows what it’ll become now. So why not just build your own? When the Oculus first came out [Ahmet] was instantly intrigued — he began researching virtual reality and the experience offered by the Oculus — but curiosity alone wasn’t enough for the $300 price tag. He held off until he had a useful purpose for it, and as it turns out he did — he builds and flies multicopters, for which an FPV setup would be super handy!

Other FPV setups cost close to $300 as well, so getting a device with more features just makes sense. Promptly after realizing this, he faced the Maker’s Dilemma: Buy it, or build it? To test the waters, he decided to order some aspheric lenses to do some quick tests with a smart phone and a ghetto cardboard box setup — the results were surprisingly good. No turning back now!
The hardware consists of:

  • 5.6″ 1280×800 LCD
  • 3D printed enclosure
  • 12V power adapter
  • USB to TTL
  • 50mm aspheric lenses (5X zoom)
  • Arduino Mini Pro
  • GY-85 9DOF IMU
  • Various wires, foam padding, and glue

The majority of the cost here is in the LCD, with everything else being pretty inexpensive. Once it’s all built (details on his blog), it is time to get the software, downloaded right off of GitHub. The rest is pretty self-explanatory — just take a look at the results! We’re even tempted to build one now. Videos below.

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Ecstatic Computation: Exploring Technoshamanism With Virtual Reality

June 12, 2014 by 62 Comments

A Digital Shaman

Here’s a really clever use for the Oculus Rift — Ecstatic Computation, a virtual reality spirit journey.

[Michael Allison] began his university career as an artist and musician… and somehow down the line, became a Technoshaman. His thesis, presented at ITP 2014, is on computational art, virtual reality, cognitive psychology and his research on various religious, spiritual and scientific methods that try to explain the relationship between our bodies, minds and the universe itself.

Using virtual reality, Ecstatic Computation is a ritual that explores the merging of consciousness and quantum energy in the physio-chemical registration of state within the computer’s memory. The moment when human and computer become one; the moment when thought becomes bit and electrons become ideas.

Sound crazy? Maybe — but check out the video demonstrations after the break. To create this experience he’s using an Oculus Rift, a Microsoft Kinect, a fan, a small keyboard and of course a computer to render it all. During the participant’s journey, [Michael] leads them in flight, passing through a quantum tunnel, merging with quantum energy inside of state registration within the computer’s memory and finally ending by falling into infinity.

All the graphics and effects are generated on the fly using GLSL generation using a robust graphics rendered called Smolder which he wrote himself, which is built on top of Cinder.

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CastAR And Holographic Print Preview For 3D Printers!

May 23, 2014 by 18 Comments

CastAR and 3D printing

Google glasses this, Oculus rift that, CastAR… With all these new vision devices coming out, the world of augmented reality is fast becoming, well, a reality!

Here’s a really cool concept [Ryan Smith] came up for 3D printing. Using [Jeri Ellsworth’s] CastAR, [Ryan Smith] has created a really cool technical illusion to demonstrate visual prototyping on his Makerbot. Using a laser cutter he’s perforated the front plastic panel of the Makerbot, which allows a semi-transparent overlay that when you use the CastAR’s projector it gives you a holographic visual effect.

The glasses track the reference object (in this case, the gear) and then project interfacing gears in an animation over-top of the existing part. [Ryan] sees this as the next step in 3D printing for artists and makers because it can help give you a 3D preview of your part, for example if you’re not fully sure what scale you want it to print at, you could actually put a mating object, or your hand, behind the screen and visually see the interface!
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