Excerpts from a Virtual Reality Researcher
A couple of new pieces of technology have caught my radar recently. One is Valve’s Lighthouse Tracking System. This technology may replace the 10-30,000 dollar tracking systems that presently exist and remain an expensive selling point for VR display systems. Another one that has caught my attention is Google’s Project Soli. It’s basically an embedded …
With the vizHome project – a significant challenge has been determining techniques to efficiently render the millions of points we capture by way of the LiDAR scanner. Some of the homes we scanned resulted in data sets upwards of 750 million points. Although very powerful, modern GPUs are nowhere near being able to rendering that …
It seems that these days new Head Mounted Displays (HMDs) are being released every month or so, with their cost rapidly declining since the days from 2004-2006 when I worked with one in graduate school. Overall, my impression with recent HMDs is that they are hands down better than the one I worked with during graduate …
During implementation of the vizHOME viewer point rendering application, it quickly became apparent that with the amount of data we are gathering with the LiDAR scanner, we would need a multi-threaded technique for loading points outside of our main rendering thread.. often known as an “out-of-core” technique. Implementation details on how to properly execute this …
A big project I’m currently involved with is developing an out of core point cloud renderer for the vizHOME project. This application enables viewing of LiDAR scanned homes within our C6-CAVE as well as the Oculus Rift and DSCVR system. The application is fully functional and I’m at the point of optimizing it. In working …
Welcome! The website is meant to serve as a location to share various thoughts and excerpts from a virtual reality researcher and software developer. I have been employed at the University of Wisconsin Madison’s Living Environment’s Laboratory since February 2012 where I have been developing software, maintaining hardware, working with students, and contributing to virtual …