Chris Hand from Leicester Polytechnic offers a delightful history of W Industries, the company who brought us the various Virtuality VR game systems. His history begins in the early 80′s and takes us only to early October of 1991, not long after the commercial introduction of Virtuality’s Series 1000 Amiga based systems.
The excerpts below offer a taste of the VR buzz in 1991, but take the time to read the entire history!
A video clip from an early 80′s episode of the BBC TV programme “Tomorrow’s World” showed some of the early work of Dr Waldern. The “Roaming Caterpillar” (as it was known) was shown being used by presenter Maggie Philbin to examine a virtual room. The display was a large B/W monitor with handles on each side, supported by a flexible arm on castors covered by a concertina of rubber (the “caterpillar”). The image displayed was a wire-frame view of the “contents” of the (actually empty) room. The location of the monitor was sensed by 3 fixed speakers emitting audible clicks in a fixed sequence, with the time taken to reach microphones being used to calculate the distance. It was also possible to detect the position of the user’s fingers by wearing tubes on them, with microphones and wires attached to a control unit. By pinching her fingers together in the right place, the presenter picked up the receiver of a virtual telephone and left it suspended in space.
From 1991 to 1996 W Industries Virtuality systems defined the image of VR in the location based entertainment arena. Here in the US, Horizon Entertainment was their sole distributor. W Industries was remarkably innovative with their use of technology, but their “innovations” in finances were not so successful. Arcade operators had a difficult time breaking even; motivated by their IPO, W extended credit to these operators to bolster their sales figures; and by 1996 W was in receivership leaving stockholders and vendors less than whole.
However… Virtuality, first using an Amiga platform and later a 486 PC, achieved a remarkable quality of game play for those early years. This collection of videos will give you a flavor. Thanks go out to Fronzel who generously compiled many of these. Watch!
Keep reading…
They say you’re not a true 3D enthusiast until you’ve got a shelf full of red/cyan and green/magenta anaglyph 3D glasses. I’m ready to dump mine in the waste bin, but there’s this little problem; two more shelves of anaglyph DVD, BluRay and VHS movies collected over the years. Soon the studios will start to release the latest blockbusters in full color BluRay 3D, but somehow I doubt they’ll find the time or budget to convert “Comin’ At Ya” or “The Stewardesses” from anaglyph to full color 3D. Who knows, maybe the full color film prints are lost forever.
For a couple of years there were two online purveyors of converted movies; they both did a creditable job, but recently dropped out of sight. My suspicion is that the films’ copyright holders got wise and shut them down for selling unlicensed copies. I doubt the sin had anything to do with 3D, just that they were selling unauthorized copies of the studios’ movies.
However, for those of us who purchase legitimate anaglyph 3D movies from Amazon or our local video store, the courts have strongly affirmed that we can watch them any way we choose, in private, whether we watch standing on our head, projected on a fishbowl, reflected off the water in our toilet, or even in full color 3D! In other words, if we have a gadget at home that translates anaglyph movies into full color and we use it solely to privately watch the legitimate 3D movies we own, we’re well within our legal rights.
And here’s how!
Build your own LEEP style wide field of view head mounted display optics. Check out the instruction video and parts list below.
In the late 80′s and early 90′s wide field of view head mounted displays were all the rage; immersion was everything! The dominant HMD vendors, VPL Research and Virtual Research shared the same optical implementation: lenses from LEEP Systems. These wide angle optics (designed by Eric Howlett of LEEP), coupled with 2″ or 3″ LCD screens really did deliver a totally immersive visual experience…except that the resolution of the LCDs were so low that under this extreme magnification each pixel looked like a football; you were swimming is a sea of colored footballs!
LCD Screens and LEEP Optics
By the mid 90′s (and up to the present) a primary design criteria for head mounted displays was small size and light weight. Indeed there are entire head mounts that weigh only a few ounces and look almost like sunglasses. Sadly, immersion and wide field of view were abandoned. The new generation of head mounts had 20 – 30 deg. field of view. You felt like you were looking through a distant window.
There are tons of stereoscopic DVDs and VHS tapes on the market encoded as field interlaced stereo. Also, one of the easiest ways to make 3D video is with a camcorder (NTSC or PAL) and a NuView 3D adaptor (often selling on Ebay for less than $100.) For those of you who want to watch on a good old fashioned television, shutter glasses offer excellent 3D (but with some flicker.) Another use for NTSC/PAL shutter glasses is to preview on a field monitor when shooting 3D video.
3D glasses (wired) are a dime a dozen these days, but how do you synchronize them with the video fields of an NTSC or PAL TV signal. Today’s project shows you how to build and package a control circuit to do just that. It is simple and cheap, and the packaging is mighty rugged.
Printed circuit board layout
For 150 years people have been free-viewing stereoscopic photos (and more recently videos) in a side by side cross-eyed format, where the left view is positioned to the right of the right view. You’re force to cross your eyes like an optical contortionist. For eyeballs with less agility, this can become painful. By using prisms in front of each eye, the eye strain is eliminated. Here’s a truly unique DIY method for building such a viewer on the cheap.
Finished Goggles
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