topical media & game development
example(s) -- 3D vision
Have you ever wondered how it would feel to be
in Star Trek's holodeck, or experience your
game in a truly spatial way, instead of on a flat LCD-display.
In
[DEEP], an overview is given of technology
that is being developed to enable
volumetric display of 3D data, in particular the
Perspecta swept-volume display (middle) and LightSpace DepthCube (right),
that uses a projector behind a stack of 20 liquid-crystal screens.
The first approach of displaying volumetric data,
taken by the Perspecta swept-volume display, is to project a sequence
of images on a rotating sheet of reflective material to
create the illusion of real volume.
The psychological mechanism that enables us to see
volumes in this way is the same as the mechanism that forces us
to see motion in frame-based animation, at 24 frames per second,
namely persistence of vision.
LightSpace DepthCube uses a stack of 20 transparent screens
and alternates between these screens in a rapid way,
thus creating the illusion of depth in a similar way.
In comparison with other approaches of creating depth illusion,
the solutions sketched above require no special eyewear
and do not impose any strain on the spectator due
to unnatural focussing as for example
with autostereoscopic displays.
For rendering 3D images on either the Perspecta
or DepthCube traditional rendering with for example OpenGL
suffices, where the z-coordinate is taken as an indication for
selecting a screen or depth position on the display.
Rendering with depth, however, comes at a price.
Where traditional rendering has to deal with,
say 1024x748 pixels,
the DepthCube for example needs to be able to
display 1024x748x20, that is 15.3 million, voxels
(the volumetric equivalent of a pixel)
at a comparable framerate.
(C) Æliens
04/09/2009
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