Advanced Technology for Portable Personal Visualization
Abstract
We have been working since the early 1970's on aspects of these technologies and have been advancing the state of the art by a 'driving problem' approach; we let the needs of selected applications stimulate the direction of the technological developments, and then test new results by their impact on solving the original application. We have been working on three application areas: molecular modeling, 3D medical imaging, and modeling of architectural interiors. We have put together complete systems that include the head-mounted display device, the display generation hardware, and the head and hand tracker. We bought the components when available and built the components when there was a clear advantage to doing so: (a) We built, under separate major funding by DARPA and NSF, the display generation hardware (our most recent machine is Pixel-Planes 5), (b) We built an electro-optical helmet-tracking system (the ceiling tracker) that can determine position and orientation over a large area(currently under a 10 x 12 foot ceiling)---to our knowledge, the first demonstrated scalable-area helmet tracker. (c) We buy head-mounted display devices, but continue to build head-mounted display devices with see-through capability--the ability for the wearer to observe virtual world objects superimposed onto his/her physical surroundings.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Dec 01, 1991
- Accession Number
- ADA245905
Entities
People
- Frederick P. Brooks Jr.
- Henry Fuchs
Organizations
- University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill