[sci.virtual-worlds] More exciting "Garage VR"!

hibbett@prcs3.decnet.philips.be (05/11/91)

Chris writes, in reply to Greg ?'s article:-

>>It seems to me that a powerglove could be used for the position sensor 
>>(just aim it backwards, and put the receivers behind you) and still 
>>let you use a power glove for a glove.  
>
>The noisiness of the data given by the ultrasound sensors will drive you wild.

I agree with Chris, but I wonder if a simpler (or rather, cheaper!) system 
would be possible given a less complex working environment, say a box room 
with just a desk and perhaps a chair. In this kind of environment I am mostly
going to be sitting still, moving my head up & down, left to right and 
using a glove to define directions of movement etc.

Personally for something as simple as this, I would use a combination of
ultra-sonic transducers  for head location/orientation, but the problem
comes with the glove. It may be possible to use ultra-sonics on the glove too,
using time-multiplexing, but this will of course result in a very low sampling
rate. How about frequency-multiplexing? Are ultra-sonic transducers available
at higher frequencies tahn the standard 40KHz?

As for eye-phones, I am still playing with a pair of Citizen M329 colour
LCD monitors. Not very good, they have twisted-nematic (TN) glass with 
colour filters which results in a very tight viewing angle. However they are
cheap (115 pounds each at Dixons) which is very important when justifying
the purchase to my wife!

>
>The rest of the post is on the right track. See Randy Pausch's paper in 
>CHI 91, "Virtual Reality on Five Dollars a Day".
>

Sounds interesting. I'd like to read it, but I've never heard of CHI. 
What is it Chris, or where is it?

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[MODERATOR'S NOTE:  CHI is the conference for SIGCHI, the computer-human 
interaction special interest group of the Assn. for Computing Machinery 
(ACM), the American overarching professional group.  Randy Pausch spoke
on "VR on $5 a Day" at the New Orleans CHI, just concluded.  You can 
reach Randy  Paucsch (I think) at pausch@cs.uva.edu.  Anyway, he's online 
here, so maybe he'll reply directly to these posts. He put up a "$5/day VR" 
paper here; it's in the archives (pointers, anyone?). -- Bob Jacobson]

bro@eunomia.rice.edu (Douglas Monk) (05/16/91)

In article <1991May11.223450.5@milton.u.washington.edu> hibbett@prcs3.
decnet.philips.be writes:

>Chris writes, in reply to Greg ?'s article:-
>
>>The rest of the post is on the right track. See Randy Pausch's paper in 
>>CHI 91, "Virtual Reality on Five Dollars a Day".
>
>Sounds interesting. I'd like to read it, but I've never heard of CHI. 
>What is it Chris, or where is it?

I'm not Chris, but I was at CHI '91. The full citation is:

"Virtual Reality on Five Dollars A Day", Randy Pausch. 
In proceedings of CHI, 1991 (New Orleans, Louisiana, April 28-May 2, 1991)
ACM, New York, 1991. Pages 265-270.

Full citation of proceedings:

Human Factors in Computing Systems: Reaching Through Technology.
CHI '91 Conference Proceedings. Scott P. Robertson, Gary M. Olson, Judith
S. Olson, editors. New Orleans, Louisiana, April 27-May 2, 1991. Sponsored
by Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on Computer-
Human Interaction (ACM SIGCHI) in cooperation with [a list of 20 or so other
groups that I just cannot bring myself to type in].

I believe the proceedings also appear special issues of ACM SIGCHI Bulletin.
(At least, they do here at Rice University.)

Doug Monk (bro@rice.edu)

Disclaimer: These views are mine, not necessarily my organization's.