An affordable surround-screen virtual reality display

Building a projection-based virtual reality display is a time, cost, and resource intensive enterprise andmany details contribute to the final display quality. This is especially true for surround-screen displays wheremost of them are one-of-a-kind systems or custom-made installations with specialized projectors, framing, andprojection screens. In general, the costs of acquiring these types of systems have been in the hundreds and evenmillions of dollars, specifically for those supporting synchronized stereoscopic projection across multiple screens.Furthermore, the maintenance of such systems adds an additional recurrent cost, which makes them hard to affordfor a general introduction in a wider range of industry, academic, and research communities.We present a low-cost, easy to maintain surround-screen design based on off-the-shelf affordable componentsfor the projection screens, framing, and display system. The resulting system quality is comparable to significantlymore expensive commercially available solutions. Additionally, users with average knowledge can implement ourdesign and it has the added advantage that single components can be individually upgraded based on necessity aswell as available funds

Discomfort luminance level of head-mounted displays depending on the adapting luminance

The Images in an immersive head-mounted display (HMD) for virtual reality provide the sole source for visual adaptation. Thus, significant, near-instantaneous increases in luminance while viewing an HMD can result in visual discomfort. Therefore, the current study investigated the luminance change necessary to induce this discomfort. Based on the psychophysical experiment data collected from 10 subjects, a prediction model was derived using four complex images and one neutral image, with four to six levels of average scene luminance. Result showed that maximum area luminance has a significant correlation with the discomfort luminance level than average, median, or maximum pixel luminance. According to the prediction model, the discomfort luminance level of a head-mounted display was represented as a positive linear function in log(10) units using the previous adaptation luminance when luminance is calculated as maximum area luminance

TechNews digests: Jan - Nov 2008

TechNews is a technology, news and analysis service aimed at anyone in the education sector keen to stay informed about technology developments, trends and issues. TechNews focuses on emerging technologies and other technology news. TechNews service : digests september 2004 till May 2010 Analysis pieces and News combined publish every 2 to 3 month

The emotional contents of the ‘space’ in spatial music

Human spatial perception is how we understand places. Beyond understanding what is where (William James’ formulation of the psychological approach to perception); there are holistic qualities to places. We perceive places as busy, crowded, exciting, threatening or peaceful, calm, comfortable and so on. Designers of places spend a great deal of time and effort on these qualities; scientists rarely do. In the scientific world-view physical qualities and our emotive responses to them are neatly divided in the objective-subjective dichotomy. In this context, music has traditionally constituted an item in a place. Over the last two decades, development of “spatial music” has been within the prevailing engineering paradigm, informed by psychophysical data; here, space is an abstract, Euclidean 3-dimensional ‘container’ for events. The emotional consequence of spatial arrangements is not the main focus in this approach. This paper argues that a paradigm shift is appropriate, from ‘music-in-a-place’ to ‘music-as-a-place’ requiring a fundamental philosophical realignment of ‘meaning’ away from subjective response to include consequences-in-the-environment. Hence the hegemony of the subjective-objective dichotomy is questioned. There are precedents for this, for example in the ecological approach to perception (Gibson). An ecological approach to music-as-environment intrinsically treats the emotional consequences of spatio-musical arrangement holistically. A simplified taxonomy of the attributes of artificial spatial sound in this context will be discussed

Artificially created stimuli produced by a genetic algorithm using a saliency model as its fitness function show that Inattentional Blindness modulates performance in a pop-out visual search paradigm

Salient stimuli are more readily detected than less salient stimuli, and individual differences in such detection may be relevant to why some people fail to notice an unexpected stimulus that appears in their visual field whereas others do notice it. This failure to notice unexpected stimuli is termed 'Inattentional Blindness' and is more likely to occur when we are engaged in a resource-consuming task. A genetic algorithm is described in which artificial stimuli are created using a saliency model as its fitness function. These generated stimuli, which vary in their saliency level, are used in two studies that implement a pop-out visual search task to evaluate the power of the model to discriminate the performance of people who were and were not Inattentionally Blind (IB). In one study the number of orientational filters in the model was increased to check if discriminatory power and the saliency estimation for low-level images could be improved. Results show that the performance of the model does improve when additional filters are included, leading to the conclusion that low-level images may require a higher number of orientational filters for the model to better predict participants' performance. In both studies we found that given the same target patch image (i.e. same saliency value) IB individuals take longer to identify a target compared to non-IB individuals. This suggests that IB individuals require a higher level of saliency for low-level visual features in order to identify target patches

Towards transparent telepresence

It is proposed that the concept of transparent telepresence can be closely approached through high fidelity technological mediation. It is argued that the matching of the system capabilities to those of the human user will yield a strong sense of immersion and presence at a remote site. Some applications of such a system are noted. The concept is explained and critical system elements are described together with an overview of some of the necessary system specifications

Cosmic cookery : making a stereoscopic 3D animated movie.

This paper describes our experience making a short stereoscopic movie visualizing the development of structure in the universe during the 13.7 billion years from the Big Bang to the present day. Aimed at a general audience for the Royal Society's 2005 Summer Science Exhibition, the movie illustrates how the latest cosmological theories based on dark matter and dark energy are capable of producing structures as complex as spiral galaxies and allows the viewer to directly compare observations from the real universe with theoretical results. 3D is an inherent feature of the cosmology data sets and stereoscopic visualization provides a natural way to present the images to the viewer, in addition to allowing researchers to visualize these vast, complex data sets. The presentation of the movie used passive, linearly polarized projection onto a 2m wide screen but it was also required to playback on a Sharp RD3D display and in anaglyph projection at venues without dedicated stereoscopic display equipment. Additionally lenticular prints were made from key images in the movie. We discuss the following technical challenges during the stereoscopic production process; 1) Controlling the depth presentation, 2) Editing the stereoscopic sequences, 3) Generating compressed movies in display speci¯c formats. We conclude that the generation of high quality stereoscopic movie content using desktop tools and equipment is feasible. This does require careful quality control and manual intervention but we believe these overheads are worthwhile when presenting inherently 3D data as the result is signi¯cantly increased impact and better understanding of complex 3D scenes