[SDL] VR Goggles

[J. Grant]

Hi

Bob Pendleton wrote:
> On Tue, 2003-02-18 at 12:21, Atrix Wolfe wrote:
>> sweet deal!
>> 
>> i wonder why VR goggles havent taken off...i mean theyve had the idea for
>> ages.  I wonder if its because people cant see the keyboard to type while
>> they have the goggles on?  newbies! (;
> 
> There are a lot of reasons why they haven't caught on. The main one is
> simply price. If you want to pay less than a $1000 USD for a pair you
> get a resolution of around 263x230 pixels. So, it like living in block
> world. On top of that most displays don't include a head tracker so you
> have to lay out another chunk of cash for that. And motion sensors are
> not very accurate unless they actually tether you so you can't move
> around very much. Then there is the cost of VR gloves so that you can
> interact with any thing. All in all, a lot of cash for a pretty poor
> experience. If you want a GOOD VR system you can easily spend closer to
> $100,000 USD than $1,000 USD.

Sadly true, however there is a great book that details using cheap HW
with your computer, "The Virtual Reality Construction Kit" by Joe
Gradecki.  It is out of print, but you can find it 2nd hand in "all good
booksellers".  So you can use your old Victor Maxx 3D goggles and Nintendo
Power Glove etc.  It includes a floppy with dos software.

> OTOH, you can get a nice pair of red/green filter glasses for a few
> cents and get a rock solid stereo on your current hardware. The color is
> wrong, but the price is right.

Do you have an links to how this has implemented before? I would like to
try something like this out with SDL.
(I was working on 3D voxel modeling with SDL previously)

Currently I can see the two different filter approaches:

* anaglyph - blue and red one for each eye used for 2D photos in 
newspapers etc.
   (uses anaglyph images, limited to greyscale)

* passive polarised filter, with left rotated 90 degrees? from the left 
one etc
   (I forget how we did this is A-Level Physics!)  This seems the best
   approach, as it is used by Disney in Stormriders 3D ride, and also T2
   at Universal Studios.  Requires stereo capable projector/display.


I have a couple of polarised glasses and the red/green filter type to
test ideas out on. I'm not sure how the anaglyph images are created, but it
would be very cool to test this with SDL!


Cheers


JG