Insight VR

wiiMote tracking demo: Light Saber from InsightVR on Vimeo.

I’m going to demo this (and several other things) in my OSCON presentation, this Wednesday, July 22, ’09, at 1:45pm. I’ve already go it doing more than this. I can now stab boxes with the tip of the lightsaber to destroy them. I’m cleaning up the code and will post it in time for the presentation.

In preparation for my OSCON presentation I purchased a bunch of stuff from Deal Extreme.  Pretty much one or two  of everything on their IR LED page.

Long story short: they don’t work with the wiiMote.  These things might be great for other applications such as night vision, but they don’t work really well with the wiiMote.  I was hoping that they’d put out enough IR so that I could do some tricks with reflective tape, but even getting the spotlight or the flashlight to register when shining them directly at the wiiMote was difficult.  I assume that it is because of the wavelength of the light.  Their LEDs put out 850 nm light, which is pretty close to visible, in fact you can see a red glow when they are on.  The things I buy at Radio Shack (which are waaaaay overpriced but they work) put out 940 nm light and I can’t tell at all when they are on with the naked eye.

So while the stuff at Deal Extreme is real inexpensive, it didn’t work for me.  Nothing against them, in fact I thought as as far as build quality goes everything was fine, other than the almost nonexistent packaging.

Despite what Engadget might say, I am not Johnny Lee.  In fact, I am John Harrison.  While my wiiMote experiments were inspired by Johnny Lee, they are my own creation.  I’ve see his YouTube videos, read some of his blog posts and that’s it.  I have not read any of his source code or even implemented the same demos as him.  My FPS demo is my own creation, and the interaction, while inspired by Johnny’s stuff, is different and my own design.

I do think it is interesting that Johnny has been hired by Microsoft and I’m sure he’ll continue to innovate there.  I don’t think that the home-brew community will have as much interest given that it seems unlike that MS will create a device (and software in this case) that is as open as the wiiMote.

I think project Natal (I speak Portuguese, so Merry Christmas!) is a project with a lot of potential.  That said, it is going to take a lot more work to innovate with it than it has taken Johnny with the wiiMote.  The wiiMote is a relatively simple device, and for the most part Johnny has used it to track the relative locations of 2 (and sometimes up to 4) IR points in space.  Generally this has been done in 2D, though there are tricks to determine 3D positioning from two points, and using two wiiMotes can give actual 3D location.  In any case, there is a limited amount of data to keep track of and you know it with a great deal of precision without having to do very much processing at all.

Contrast this with Natal.

Using stereo pairs of webcams to generate 3D information is considerably more complex than what people are doing with wiiMotes.  There is a great deal more processing, more noise to deal with, and presumably less precision.  Plus, developers need to decide what to track, and what various gestures might mean, and then make them work for people of all body types, and deal with other people moving in the scene.

This might sound easy, and maybe it will all work, and MS will develop tools to make it easy for developers.  My guess is that Natal will be a evolutionary step forward from things such as Eye Toy and other webcam based input systems.  It will make for cool demos, but in practice will be frustrating and inconsistent.

I hope I’m wrong, and that it is revolutionary, precise, and consistent.

I had a great time at PyCon and was gratified to see the number of people that showed up for the wiiMote open space and the enthusiasm that they showed. Oh, and the patience too, given that it took much longer that I had expected to get the demo to actually work. Sorry about that.

I know that I owe everybody new downloads. I’m working on it. I want to make sure that things are packaged up nicely and are relatively easy to use. So expect a post with detailed instructions and downloads soon.

Also I’ve done some more visualizer work. It isn’t ready for download yet, but here is a preview of a new visualization mode for Manifesto:

Manifesto Demo: Happy Up Here from InsightVR on Vimeo.

Together with my brother I submitted a proposal to PyCon to run a tutorial on wiiMote headtracking under Python. Given that they are running two days of tutorials this year I thought we had a pretty good shot. I guess we were wrong. After seeing on a mailing list that acceptance letters had been sent out over a week prior I wrote and asked for a formal rejection if such a thing was coming. A day later I got it.
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Here’s another crazy concept for odd Wiimote interaction.  Cover a whiffle ball in IR reflective material.  Set up two Wiimotes with IR emitters to “look” at the ball.  Then hit it with a golf club.  A real golf club.  You probably want to do this outside.

Since the Wiimotes track at 100 FPS you should be able to grab a 3D trajectory pretty accurately.  You can use the whiffle ball trajectory to estimate a real trajectory.  Set up a projector and a screen and you’ve got a reasonable virtual golf simulator that will work with real clubs.  You might even be able to do have a self-powered ball that emits IR on its own by suffing some IR LED throwies into it.

In other news I got the lightsaber concept working a week or two ago.  I want to build a better saber and shoot some video of it.  Hopefully I get to that soon enough.

As I mentioned earlier I’ll be presenting at Utah Code Camp held at Neumont University in South Jordan, UT.  The schedule is out and I’m at 2:40 pm – 3:40 pm in room 201.  You can download the presentation here.  It should run about 45 minutes including short demos which will leave plenty of time for questions but perhaps not enough time for playing.

The new missiles, explosions, and collision detection stuff is pretty fun and should make the 3D demo all the more entertaining.

I’ve been asked to discuss both the details of both how headtracking works and how I used the DarwiinRemote library. I hope to accomplish both in this post.

I became aware of the concept of headtracking when I saw the Johnny Chung Lee video describing his wiiMote headtracking project, which is amazing, as are all his projects. I realized that it would solve the primary problem that was facing me in furthering the development of my laser games: it gave me a way to allow players to move in a game world while holding a laser gun with both hands.

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