Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!bbn!jr@bbn.com
From: jr@bbn.com (John Robinson)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.next
Subject: Re: Hundreds of books on an optical
Message-ID: <32290@bbn.COM>
Date: 15 Nov 88 06:47:47 GMT
References: <398@uceng.UC.EDU> <207400003@inmet>
Sender: news@bbn.COM
Reply-To: jr@bbn.com (John Robinson)
Organization: BBN Systems and Technologies Corporation, Cambridge MA
Lines: 26
In-reply-to: justin@inmet

In article <207400003@inmet>, justin@inmet writes:
>
>Re: Dan Mocsny's Lady in the Boat
>
>Now, what I'm curious about is: is anyone actually working towards this
>stuff?

At least some of it has been demonstrated.  Ivan Sutherland, while at
Harvard, built a system based on the PDP-1 with the following:

. "sword of Damocles", a telescoping arm with gymbal joints and shaft
encoders, attached to a helmet with:
. a pair of 1-2" CRT's mounted on the sides and projected with prisms
into wearer's eyes.
. the PDP-1 ran a program which tracked the wearer's position in the
room, and generated a stereo pair of line drawings of the room's walls
and maybe some furniture (the PDP-1 cabinets, e.g.).

The trick to this system was finding anyone crazy enough to put 30
kilovolts upside his or her temples.

Ivan designed the graphics hardware to generate 3D images in real
time, the approach that he went off and built into a company at E&S.
--
/jr
jr@bbn.com or bbn!jr