brucec%phoebus.labs.tek.com@RELAY.CS.NET (Bruce Cohen) (03/19/91)
In article <18544@milton.u.washington.edu> herbt@apollo.sarnoff.com (Herbert H Taylor III) writes: > 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. It might help to map distance in a VR world nonlinearly (sort of like forcing perspective in backgrounds when shooting films of models). A step near the center of the room might map to a step in the VR; the next step might map to 2 steps, and so on exponentially. Virtual seven-league boots. I haven't thought this through yet, but you might also, given enough space to walk around in, make straight lines curve enough to bring the virtunaut back to the center of the room on most trajectories, without triggering the balance sensors in the ear into knowing the path was curved. Niven and Barnes suggested such a setup in the science-fiction novel "Dream Park". They made a dome a few hundred meters in diameter seem to contain an island thirty or forty kilometers long, with hills hundreds of meters high. > 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. How much resolution can you get in IR? Could you reliably detect the orientation of the finger joints, for instance? -- ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Speaker-to-managers, aka Bruce Cohen, Computer Research Lab email: brucec@tekcrl.labs.tek.com Tektronix Laboratories, Tektronix, Inc. phone: (503)627-5241 M/S 50-662, P.O. Box 500, Beaverton, OR 97077