Indeed Polhemus is the standard instrument. From 2004, Polhemus gear seemed unacceptably clunky to be wearable and cost-effective by my "jewelry' standard, but Memory-Place could perhaps put its Verfremdungseffekt to good use. And it's now sleeker. If the MP group decides to really go after 6DOF in an future phase of this research, perhaps someone go source and borrow one? Check TAG , Dr. Mudur, or CIISE.
Naviscribe seems to be an interesting case of the "good enough" solution. Marek's patent is for reporting euler angle, but the other 6DOF composite the information, which is why his method is so compact, with very nice optics in a tiny lens. The problem is path dependence.
All Souls College, Oxford & Stanford University 2000.
As with other TML work less tightly coupled to the consumer commodity market (eg. game controllers), we can try to go our own way and leverage our particular knowledge and friendship networks, subject to practical constraints.
Xin Wei
On 2011-05-30, at 7:52 PM, <adrian@adrianfreed.com> <adrian@adrianfreed.com> wrote:
As official grumpy old man on these things I should point out that a
high precision 6dof device is the holy grail
and hard to do at any price. It is a question of making an inventory of
where the various solutions proposed fall down.
There are dozens of companies that have crashed and burned on this
already so we should be cautious as to where
we put our eggs.The Naviscribe core technique was patented 4 years ago. What happened?
Why can't they implement it or raise the money
to implement it for a gaming controller?For the particular needs of the Memory/Place work it may be easier to
borrow or rent the market leader for a short time: http://www.polhemus.com/?page=Motion_PATRIOT%20Wireless-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Re: "scientific" gesture / movement research ?
From: Morgan Sutherland <morgan@morgansutherland.net>
Date: Mon, May 30, 2011 10:36 am
To: Sha Xin Wei <shaxinwei@gmail.com>
Cc: Adrian Freed <adrian@adrianfreed.com>, memory-place@concordia.ca,
Satinder Gill <spg12@cam.ac.uk>
Scientifically speaking, I'd love to see somebody integrate vibrotactile
feedback into this. There is the feedback problem (vibration add noise to
signal which adds noise to the vibration motor ad infinitum) to figure out.
http://www.cim.mcgill.ca/~haptic/pub/HY-VH-RE-CAS-05.pdf ("A Tactile
Enhancement Instrument for Minimally Invasive Surgery")
http://www.cim.mcgill.ca/~haptic/pub/HY-VH-JASA-10.pdf (on better vibration
motors)
I remember I had a specific idea for this kind of device recently – I'll see
if I can remember...
As for the wireless part, it would be dead simple to use an XBee to beam the
data over to a USB data acquisition device (Teensy or whatever), just not
elegant (XBee's are bulky in comparison to a pen). The question there is
whether we get analog or digital output from the pen itself. If it's
digital, then there could be synchronization problems unless Marek can
provide the spec for the communication protocol. If it's analog, then it's
dead simple – just cut the wire and put 2 XBees in between. Add 1 extra week
for unforeseeable headaches that always crop up when doing wireless.
I'm actually very excited about this – if this gets commercialized and keeps
its form factor, I can see myself using one regularly, hopefully by then in
conjunction with a fast RGB E-ink display. Viva post-television.
Morgan
On Mon, May 30, 2011 at 3:55 AM, Sha Xin Wei <shaxinwei@gmail.com> wrote:
Hi Adrian, and scientific researchers,
Raising the stakes and thinking ahead to more robust and precise
instrumentation, here's the
NaviScribe 6-DOF 3D wand by Electronic Scripting Products, Inc. (ESPi) in
Palo Alto
The exclusive patent describes a 6 DOF, x,y,z + euler angles The
company's founded by a physicist friend from Stanford: Marek Alboszta. Not
productized yet. "Commercial" co-development would require O(100K) USD.
I've not discussed how to enter into actual relation with this company, but
we could perhaps work out a deal. This would make sense in a real NSERC/NSF
co-development grant.
Shall we think about this in context of a scientific gesture research
proposal, along with high FPS cameras, and EONYX etc? Let's discuss this in
June.
Xin Wei
On 2011-05-20, at 9:32 PM, Marek Alboszta wrote:
Hello Xin Wei,
We can definitely do everything you ask (briefly - up to 100 Hz and better
with all degrees of freedom (6DOF) reported in compact stream (right now not
compressed), requires at most 120 MIPS to do everything (during periods of a
lot of activity) - unit is small so can be in a ring or glasses or headgear
or whatever you choose - we give you intervals so you can compute your
derivatives, resolution in 3D space is considerably better than 1 cm (in
plane it's down to 0.2 mm and better)). I can't do wireless unless somebody
gives me money to properly design a wireless beta unit (it is not a problem
of technology but pure resources).
...
Is your party ready to pay for this work ...? If not then we should
reschedule for when they are ready to commit resources for technology
development (or if they/your side wants to do the work). Anyway, we can
talk about it if the allocation of resources is a given - let me know.
warm greetings,
<pastedGraphic.jpg>
_____________________
Marek Alboszta
marekalb@yahoo.com
On May 20, 2011, at 10:08 AM, Sha Xin Wei wrote:
Hi Marek,
For a memory & place experiment, we would like to give people a wand that
they can hold that can report position, euler angles, and their time
derivatives. Ideally at better than 30 Hz for the entire 12-vector.
We need it wireless, range of say 10m suffices.
Spatial resolution is important, for tracking "pointing" at virtual objects
that people infer by indirectly mapping position & angle to a vibration
motor that will be embedded somewhere on their body. I expect any
pen-based input device has more than adequate time-space resolution.
We would also like to be able to have a "wand" small enough to fit anywhere
attached to the body in some not too obstrusive way.
We can write our own code to parse the data if you tell us the format
coming in some standard protocol, serial or ethernet/port stream.
The person may be free to wander around the room and point in any direction
whatsoever.
Does the wand needs to see an IR array in "front" ie be constrained to a
half-sphere, or can it be pointed in any direction provided a set of IR
beacons ...
Cheers,
Xin Wei