Insight VR

Matt suggested that I make the lightsaber demo work with an actual lightsaber. So I stole one from my son and taped some hastily soldered together LEDs to it. It worked at home so I packed it up and brought it to OSCON. The night before my demo I did a dry run and half of my IR LEDs would not light up. I discovered that some of my wires were no longer properly attached to the circuit board. So I figured that I would have to use other LEDs for the demo.

While walking around the Expo Hall I saw the Make booth. Oddly enough they had at least a dozen soldering stations set up and nobody using them at the moment. I introduced myself to Mitch, described my problem, and asked if I might be able to do some soldering.

A few minutes later my lightsaber was in working order again and I was demoing it to Mitch when we were photographed.

Mitch had lots of cool stuff in the booth, including versions of the TV-B-Gone with lots of LEDs, and the Brain Machine, which in my experience is a method of hallucinate using only the stimulus of sound and light. I’d love to see (make?) a version of the Brain Machine that is audio reactive.

As promised, here is the source code for the OSCON wiiMote demos:
Pointer and Headtracking demo
Point of View VR demo
Lightsabe demo

Here is my OSCON presentation on wiiMote headtracking. As it is just a PDF it doesn’t include the demos, and the demos are relatively cool.

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.

Somebody has posted a new visualizer, looks like its from Brazil, and it is named “High Particles”

It is a bit similar to Fountain Music, but was created using Quartz Composer, which I have yet to really investigate.  One more shiny thing to add to your collection.