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Sunday Things - delving too deep edition

posted in Links by Cargo Cult on Sunday January 15 2017

So yes, the Sunday Things is back.

Surprised yet? I definitely am. Now, to rummage through some of the masses of links I've been building up...

The exciting bit of the Bullet Time stuff in the Matrix was the background.

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The Campanile Movie - all-seeing prophet of computer graphics, Paul Debevec, made a little video back in 1997 - which proved highly influential in various ways. I first watched it when I was at university many aeons ago, and it must have been lurking in the back of my mind when doing more recent things. Great to see how the technology of capturing and recreating the real world in a computer has advanced. For a start, we have digital cameras...
Nothing to do with The Thing. Wrong end of the planet.
Greenland's receding icecap to expose top-secret US nuclear project - a decidedly cold Cold War base buried beneath the Arctic ice, with chemical, biological and nuclear waste that was assumed to be hidden for a frozen eternity.

There's a terrifyingly claustrophobic roomscale VR game in this somewhere.

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Abandoned Shale Mine - a little while ago I watched a fascinating BBC Four documentary on the Scottish oil shale industry. It included a few segments filmed by a gloriously mad, pink-haired urban explorer who'd been delving deep into some of the long-abandoned mines. This is one of her videos - dark, damp, corroded, mineralised, rotted and plain terrifying, with remnants of machinery and tools chemically and physically returning to the rocks. The regular beeps are from an air quality monitor indicating that it's still safe to breathe...

Bonus Winter Holiday in your Own Home corner:

Article comments (now closed)

mixer's gravatar

1. Destinations in a mine

Posted by mixer at 6:28AM, Sunday January 15 2017

Would it be possible to have a mine in destination ? Since there are no light how would you capture it ?

Pace's gravatar

2. Mines in VR

Posted by Pace at 11:10AM, Sunday January 15 2017

Seems like something like that would be better with full movement capabilities. Bring on the holodeck. Will it ever be possible (or is it possible now?) to move over a greater distance than your living room? Or will we be forever stuck in a chair with movement by controller for that? Maybe a VR arena sort of like paint ball places?
I still haven't tried a Vive so I'm not sure what's possible now..

Cargo Cult's gravatar

3. Re: Mines in VR

Posted by Cargo Cult at 11:14PM, Saturday January 21 2017

You'd have to take your own lighting along and set it up before taking loads of photos, I suppose - or hope for some convenient holes in the roof: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qtoZmNYCYaw

Now I want to explore some mines!

For larger-scale movement in roomscale VR, there are two big solutions right now. The first is point-and-click teleportation - sounds disorienting, but works suspiciously well. Also avoids issue with vection inducing motion sickness, with many implementations having just a brief 'blink' as you go from one place to another.

The other involves accelerating and moving the player around by pointing a controller where you want to go. Can work well, but can easily make people puke. Google Earth VR does some interesting stuff with restricting the field of view when moving and having a stationary-relative-to-your-room grid fade in around the edges - it helps a lot, but still causes issues in some people.

Me? It turns out I'm completely immune to motion sickness. But I fight for those who suffer!

Pace's gravatar

4. Re: Re:

Posted by Pace at 8:11PM, Sunday January 22 2017

Hmm, perfectly sensible.. Thanks for the info! I'll have to give this a try one of these days.

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