Cool, but, it looks exactly like watching a display with a Wii remote on your head [0, 2007]. What’s so special? Is it actually 3D this time?
I did this at the time. I downloaded his Wii app that shows the little red/white discs, and bought a battery powered Wii-bar thing that had the IR leds in it and strapped it to my head.
Can confirm, the 3D effect is 100% spot on, even the smallest move of your head caused the display to adjust perspective and your brain is totally fooled into thinking the Wii display is a just a window into a 3D scene.
tbh, it was the only cool thing I actually did with my Wii!
Your brain takes a lot more cues for depth than stereoscopic vision. The way the perspective changes as you move your head around is sufficient even for a flat display. It’s uncanny.
Only works for one person though. If you stand at an off angle to the sensors, there’s no effect at all.
I am very cross-eyed at the moment (surgery resulted in both my eyeballs moving) and require a little plastic "stickon" that goes on the left lens of my glasses; which has prisms to redirect the light so that both eyes are looking in the same direction (prisms are fairly normal; it's the _amount_ of correction I need that is abnormal).
The correction on the left lens is so bad that looking through it is completely blurry (with lots of rainbows if I'm looking towards a light). However, when looking through my glasses with both eyes, everything appears normal. I can see in stereo (which I cannot do w/o the correction) and everything is in focus. There is still _some_ rainbow effect.
So, my brain is taking the "clear image" from my right eye and overlaying it with the distance information that the left eye adds to that... but ignoring the blurry image from the left eye completely.
Honestly, I find it mind boggling.
Apple later added the effect to the homescreen in iOS 7, but much more subtle.
This sounds way too interesting, so I'll be doing some digging, apparently. Any idea if this would work effectively on a large projector screen?
Funny you should ask that! My set up IS a large projector screen (110"), and yes it does work. In fact the size enhances the experience. :D
That it's not based on head tracking, and in a product you'll be able to reasonably buy.
Not sure if they ever ran Doom on it though.
From the comments, here, it sounds like it might. There's some interesting applications, here. Thinking back to last night, it would have been really nice if when I was looking at the split-screen in my driving game with my kids, my own corner had that kind of depth to it. Hell, driving/flying games, in general, suffer from realism issues due to not being able to faithfully produce the effect of looking out a window.
Doing this on a larger screen (and throw in a transparent LCD after you work out how to bend all of this into that, assuming it can be done) and you could have a light-switch that changes the scenery from "outside" to "outside somewhere else"[0].
[0] I remember seeing that in Back to the Future II as a kid and thinking it'd be really nice to have on a cold, gloomy, February day in Michigan.