Technabob » head-tracking

Terminator T-800 Virtual Assistant Arrives, Looking for Siri Connor

Technabob — Sun, 13 Nov 2011 17:12:55 +0000

With its Siri personal virtual assistant technology in the iPhone 5, Apple has proven that we’re willing to converse with our technology – assuming it has more of a personality than your average “say one for tech support” voice recognition system. With Siri’s demeanor being somewhere between helpful and smart-ass, I still can’t see her being helpful if you need to off some humans. That’s where the Terminator T-800 Virtual Assistant comes in.

When YouTuber programming4fun found this awesome 3D model of the metal T-800 from Terminator 2, he was inspired to make his own “special” personal assistant. Using a Microsoft Kinect to do head tracking, he was able to not only make it so the floating Terminator head looks like a floating hologram, but used the speech recognition so he could ask it do his bidding.

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Damn, I was hoping that its voice would sound like Ahnold. At this point, the T-800 personal assistant seems pretty docile – unless you mention John or Sarah Connor, but that’s to be expected. Now as long as we don’t ever combine this technology with the ham-boning robot, we should be pretty safe for now.

Forza 4 Gets Cool Kinect Head Tracking

Shane McGlaun — Wed, 01 Jun 2011 20:52:38 +0000

If you spend any time on a racetrack or an autocross course inside a car with an instructor one of the things they will tell you is to look ahead of where you are and let your hands follow your eyes. It’s easy traveling at speed to focus on what’s right in front of your car and that makes it hard to go fast and anticipate what is going on ahead of you on the track. This same technique will help gamers that are fans of racing games too.

Forza Motorsport 4 is apparently going to be getting some cool head-tracking tech integrated that uses the Kinect sensor to allow the driver to smoothly look where they are going and have the view on the game change to match where the driver is looking. The impressive part for me from the video is just how smooth and responsive it is.

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As the driver moves their head, the view changes to precisely match where the driver is looking. This is very cool and will help people learn to drive faster in the game and practice might even help real world racers learn to drive better.

[via Kotaku]

Eon Icube Offers Incredibly Immersive 3d Vr Experience

Technabob — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 12:05:53 +0000

This VR technology provides for a completely immersive 3-dimensional experience by surrounding users in a cube of digital imagery, combined with stereoscopic glasses and motion-tracking hardware to provide for a dizzying ride through virtual environments.

EON Reality’s ICube system uses an array of high-definition video projectors to bounce real-time CGI images into a cubic room covered with white screen surfaces. Each visitor dons a special pair of lightweight 3D glasses which can be outfitted with IR markers to detect head movements. Users of the system can wind their way through anything from a stunning outdoor vista to the inside of a virtual airplane cabin, to gory innards of a virtual human anatomy lesson.

The ICube’s software even supports gesture-based control, allowing users to manipulate virtual objects in the 3D environment. There’s also an integrated 3D sound system which can by synchronized with the imagery on the cubic screens. Here’s a really cool video of the ICube in action courtesy of the guys over at IDEO Labs, who recently got to take a test-drive of the ICube.

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EON offers the Icube in 3-wall, 4-wall, and 6-wall configurations, designed for everything from driving and flying simulations to scientific visualization projects. With prices well into the 6-figures, you probably won’t be installing one of these in your basement any time soon.

[EON Icube via fubiz]