Tiny VRs

Discussion in 'Science and Technology' started by Metryq, Sep 26, 2013.

  1. Metryq

    Metryq Fleet Captain Fleet Captain

    Joined:
    Jan 23, 2013
    When I worked for a multimedia company in the late '90s and early 2000s, I made a lot of VR movies. They came in two types: object and panorama.

    Object VRs were made up of hundreds of stills showing an object from every angle. This was a workable solution when CPUs were slower and the fancy 3D engines now found in most games did not exist. One does not find many object VRs these days. (NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC featured a VR of the Titanic in their iPad issue last year.)

    Panoramas are essentially one photo "projected" onto a virtual cylinder or sphere. This technology is still around and used in a variety of ways. If one does not have the fancy hardware to take a "360" image in one shot, then there are lots of apps that will stitch a bunch of photos together into one panorama. So panoramas can be pursued by hobbyists.

    I was playing with a panoramic astronomy app on my iPad, marveling at the added features. The iPad's built in sensors allow the virtual night sky to be aligned to the north and the horizon, turning as I turn so that the iPad becomes a kind of window into a virtual world. I see a point of light slowly moving across the real sky and "frame it" with the iPad, where I can see the same point of light moving along in the virtual sky. Tapping the point informs me that I am looking at the spent stage of a Russian rocket launched in the late '80s. Cool.

    That prompted me to look for VR viewers. I found several and bought one that I liked. I loaded some old VRs I had made—both object and pano, although the panos are the most fun for that "window" effect. The software recommends panoramas around 8K (about 8000 pixels wide) to avoid aliasing and other artifacts. There are lots of panoramas that big, and bigger, to be found on the Web.

    Then I thought of the STAR TREK: TNG INTERACTIVE TECHNICAL MANUAL I bought sometime back in the last century. (The publishing date is 1994, the stone age for computers.) I knew the VR movies would be small, but I was still surprised by how small. QTVR was very new back in '94. I dug out the disc, then nearly gagged at how small and crude the VRs are: 320 x 216 pixels. That barely classes as a thumbnail these days.

    I'm going to have to render some new panoramas, just for fun. If anyone knows of any panorama TREK images, let me know. Maybe I'll put a head strap on the iPad and wear it like a VR visor. :)

    (The app I am using is iPano. Any VR images will do.)


    [​IMG]

    ^ Tiny VR from Tech Manual
     
    Last edited: Sep 26, 2013
  2. Haggis and tatties

    Haggis and tatties Vice Admiral Admiral

    Joined:
    Dec 27, 2002
    Location:
    Glasgow
    Yeah i still have this, i remember being blown away by it at the time, wandering around the Enterprise was really cool in this, and finding the hidden button here and there that would show a cut away movie was fun.

    An how much tech has changed, i ran this on a 25mhz Sprint PC which required its own PC desk to sit on, your running it on a device you hold in your hands, tech has come so far in such a short time, amazing.
     
  3. Metryq

    Metryq Fleet Captain Fleet Captain

    Joined:
    Jan 23, 2013
    According to another thread, technology has stagnated. Somehow a topic that broad has deflated into an armchair discussion of self-driving cars. I think it's more like dreaming has stagnated—now that we're "living in the future." But that's why I never connected with TNG. Star Trek went from "boldly going" to playing Dixon Hill as the ultimate couch potatoes. (Why do they need to travel the galaxy to do that? I guess meeting new civilizations is not exciting enough.)