For the first time in a long time, I set up a multi-camera 3D video capture space to test new intrinsic and extrinsic calibration procedures:
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Oliver Kreylos
@okreylos
I build holodecks for a living.
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I came across a series of great videos using an AR Sandbox to teach landscape design / water management:
youtu.be/RDCFbfcRcUE
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We did a VR show&tell for the chancellor last Thursday, showing how the software from the video below was used during data prep for an NIH proposal:
ucdavis.edu/news/chancello
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You know you've been wasting too much of your time on the Internet when USA Today asks you for your help in debunking a silly flat Earth meme:
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Oh for goodness' sake. The Vulkan VR compositor is now working nicely, but I notice it doesn't look *quite* right, and then realize that Vulkan not only reads textures upside-down, but also treats clip space that way, so things weren't obviously wrong, just slightly so.
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The 3D scenery was very well done and the painting integration was great, but it had forced movement throughout and no positional head tracking (it appeared the 3D scenes were pre-rendered into full-sphere stereoscopic video), so it was also quite nauseating.
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We went to a Van Gogh exhibition on Sunday, and it had a VR component (with 31 Quest headsets) which took us on a tour of 8 paintings in the context of a 3D recreation of Arles. The VR was done by an outfit called "Dirty Monitor."
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Ah, that feeling when you spend two hours debugging your CRC algorithm because it doesn't line up with other implementations, and then realize your results were different because your test string had a newline character at the end.
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Newest addition to the AR Sandbox family just arrived at UC Davis DataLab. This one is not home-built, but was donated as a kit by topobox.co Proper video coming soon.
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I made a "video poster" for a cardiology conference at UC Davis Medical Center last week, and just hit the "publish" button because why not:
youtu.be/p3eZfEFAMIY
The project is about machine learning, but I used VR during data prep.
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Someone posted this joke thread on reddit, and I had a nostalgia attack because that's literally my first computer. I did my very first attempts at 3D graphics on it, trying to recreate the trench run scene from Star Wars.
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I think the IK avatar is coming together nicely:
youtu.be/YqeE_bUtbiM
Still some bugs, but mostly solid.
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And one more thing. I've been throwing virtual balls a lot this evening, and I can tell that I'm getting better, much better than I was in the video. That's what I like about VR when it works, i.e., behaves predictably: you don't need auto-aim, you can practice an actual skill.
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Oh my. In the throwing video, I mention how one should not average reported positions to get velocity. But I forgot to mention the deep reason: averaging reduces random noise. That is *not* random noise. My excuse: it was 1am.
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I have a few thoughts on why throwing often doesn't work right in VR:
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I re-discovered this video yesterday after it came up in conversation, and think it's neat. I recorded it in June 2005, in glorious 240p, no sound, and uploaded it to KeckCAVES's YouTube account when we signed up in 2007:
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Demonstration of the new "mixed reality" screen calibration procedure that will be released with the next version of Vrui:
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I've been working with space object tracking data recently, and here's what I did with that so far:
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I started looking into Vulkan over the weekend for improved HMD support in Vrui, and 3,500 lines of C++ code later, I can draw a static image onto my Index's display:
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The old AR Sandbox support forum is down and not coming back anytime soon, so I created a new one for the time being:
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There's a hummingbird nest in our magnolia tree.
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I scraped a bunch of tide gauge data to compare the propagation of the 01/15/2022 Hunga-Tonga eruption's tsunami to a super-simple model, with surprisingly not bad results:
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[Remote user avatars like this announcement]
GIF
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UC Davis DataLab's new immersive visualization facility (tentatively dubbed "VRoom!") is almost finished:
datalab.ucdavis.edu/2021/09/23/dat
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I caught a nice shot of the Moon during this morning's eclipse.
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Update: Index driver sends canting info as 3x4 matrix via SetDisplayEyeToHead entry point, where L/R eye x = ±IPD/2 (sent redundantly), and yaw angle is exactly ±5°.
Thanks everyone; problem solved. :)
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I'm late to the party as usual, but am nonetheless excited about putting this thing through its paces.
The Vrui VR toolkit natively supports canted displays due to its CAVE heritage, but I still need to figure out how to read the necessary parameters from the driver.
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While browsing through some software on github I found this stunning bit of code (variable names changed):
output = ((3000 + ((input)&1) * 500 + (((input) >> 1) & 1) * 1000 + (((input) >> 2) & 1) * 2000) - 250)
How? Why?
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Amazing hailstorm right now:
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I made this little animation a long time ago but somehow forgot to upload it:
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I watched the behind-the-scenes for The Mandalorian and highly recommend. I learned they basically built a giant CAVE to film the CGI sets in-camera. Kinda like this, but not potato-quality:
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I was invited to write a guest post for the European Geosciences Union's geodynamics blog:
Quote Tweet
Oliver Kreylos @okreylos (Researcher at UC Davis KeckCAVES @keckcaves and UC Davis DataLab @UCDavisDataSci) shows us an immersive way of visualising 3D data through virtual reality 
#EGUBlogs @EuroGeosciences blogs.egu.eu/divisions/gd/2
#EGUBlogs @EuroGeosciences blogs.egu.eu/divisions/gd/2
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If The Lockdown is teaching me anything, it is that math textbooks are written by people who hate math.
doc-ok.org/?p=2003
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Tee hee. I find it amusing that the only time anyone from UC Davis admin ever cares about the AR Sandbox is when the web site goes down and they get peppered with support requests from people around the world.
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A closer look at Pan-Am flight 50: youtube.com/watch?v=POVVzw
A closer look at One More Orbit, and a comparison with Pan-Am 50: youtube.com/watch?v=_kVC2A
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I found out about Pan-Am's history-making flight #50 today (cnn.com/travel/article), and because seeing the route on a map doesn't do it justice, I plotted it on a (transparent) globe instead:
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