Genius hack by PhD candidate (with source code): Turn any monitor into a 3D display using a Wiimote
blogs.zdnet.com
blogs.zdnet.com
How exactly do people interface into hardware like the Wii remote? What he's doing doesn't actually seem computationally difficult--the hard part seems to be...you know, getting the xyz coords from the device.
I think its more likely the future of different sort of game - maybe those old cabal style scrolling shooters for instance.
Here's a video of some guys doing the same thing with face tracking (ie no LEDs needed) - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iUdZk4KUDTI
The directional pad or keyboard could switch between windows, doors, newly created holes, etc.
It's not immediately obvious how this will revolutionize all shooters, but for the shooting gallery type this should be included in all of them starting now.
It's clear that this tech provides much better impression of 3D than any others I've seen.
It would work for a small display as well, letting you look around through a tiny portal.
Also, am I the only one who things "cake" when someone says "portal"?
"Louis Castle announced yesterday at GDC2008 that EA's upcoming title 'Boom Blox' will ship with an easter egg that allows head-tracking using the Wii remote! [...] I'm proud. If this pans out, it'll be only 5 months between the initial research prototype to integration into a major product release. Sweet! Happy to see my stuff being used. [...] Just in case you are wondering: No, I don't get any royalties or benefits for the use of this technique in games. Personally, I'm much happier impacting the state of technology on such a large scale in such a short period of time rather than struggling to transform it into personal financial gain."
sigh. if we were just a LITTLE bit greedier, he could be so, so rich.
It's still not stereoscopic vision, but I believe there's an obvious and still fairly cheap extension that could reach that next level: place a pixel-aligned vertical lenticular lens¹ on the monitor.
This can make it so that at predictable distances from the screen, each eye sees just even or odd columns of the display, which would each show just the left-eye or right-eye frames. Without eye-tracking, being just a little off optimal position could ruin the effect.
With cheap eye-tracking, software can see which eye is in which zone, always maintaining the proper left-right mapping. (There might be flickering in transitions; I suspect people would adapt or software could fall back to monoscopic when eyes are misaligned. Thus you always have at least as strong an illusion of 3D as in this demo, but if your eyes fall into the proper lens bands -- boom! -- true stereo vision.)
As a side note, it's not immediately clear from comments like these whether the question is genuine or just a snide remark! Doesn't take much for somebody to take offense easily.
At the end of the video is a URL for his website. It is http://johnnylee.net/
His website is pretty neat. It includes more of his Wii remote projects -- including his interactive whiteboard which I think is even more interesting -- and it includes a link to his academic pursuits.
Following the "Academics" link, you'll find that his thesis project is "Projector-Based Location Discovery and Tracking", which takes his whiteboard hobby a couple of steps further.