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From: zippy@chaos.cs.brandeis.edu (Patrick Tufts)
Newsgroups: sci.virtual-worlds
Subject: Re: Homebrew VR gear
Message-ID: <7679@milton.u.washington.edu>
Date: 17 Sep 90 01:43:56 GMT
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In article <7607@milton.u.washington.edu> ins_atge@jhunix.HCF.JHU.EDU (Thomas G 
Edwards) writes:

>Another piece of VR hardware is just a video camera and a high-speed
>video digitizer.  If you put yourself up against a white wall, and
>turn the camera on yourself, and feed the digitized video into a computer
>capable of doing edge-detection, you have a sort of data-suit, i.e.
>all your body motions can be observed.
>
>One project you can do with this is "tickle".  One person gets digitized
>standing up, another person gets only his/her hands digitzed.
>The two images are combined on one screen which both participants can
>see.  When the "hands" touch the "body" (using collision-detection
>on the combined image), some sort of "tickling noise" is heard.
>
>-Tom

In fact, this very method was/is used by Myron Krueger, an "Artificial
Reality" researcher at the University of Connecticut.

UConn has an AR system in the Museum of Natural History in the Wilbur 
Cross Building at the Storrs, CT campus.  Anyone can play with it.

You stand in front of a projection screen.  A camera feeds your image
to a PDP-11, that sends your outline to the tv.  Among other things
you can:

        have a bug crawl over your outline.  you can
        grab the sucker and toss him about, too.

        'conduct' an orchestra.  The number of pointy
        things on your outline determine the notes,
        you can wave your hands around and extend yout
        fingers to make different noises.

Pat, who apolgizes for the terrible grammar of this post, and will
probably be sent to the ninth plane of hell for his misspellings :)