The magic of how that happens, and what makes this type of environment so exciting, isn’t actually as fantastical as one might be led to believe by the experience. And one mechanism for making it work, developed by researchers at North Carolina State University, may be making it even easier. Their creation, known as the Captive Input System, is a 3D printed cube, each corner of which is connected with a brightly colored ball. Each of these spheres has its own color and is designed to be picked up by a camera enabled device using the team’s custom software. The relationship of the points to each other provides information about where it is in space, and therefore impacts the image that is projected into the eyes of the viewer.
The result is a device that allows users to manipulate objects in 3D with a greatly reduced lag time, as described by Zeyuan Chen, PhD student and lead author on a paper written about the object:
“The primary advantage of Captive is that it is efficient. There are a number of tools on the market that can be used to manipulate 3D virtual objects, but Captive allows users to perform these tasks much more quickly. Basically, there’s no latency; no detectable lag time between what the user is doing and what they see on screen.”
“There are no electronic components in the system that aren’t already on your smartphone, tablet, or laptop, and 3D printing the cube is not costly. That really leaves only the cost of our software.”
More technical information on the device is contained in a paper that the team will be presenting at the Graphics Interface conference to be held in Edmonton, Alberta later this month. As of yet, the price tag on the software is not available, so it’s hard to evaluate exactly how available this system will be to the average user, but the chances are that if it’s too high there will be a bevy of individuals willing to take up the charge to develop one that is even less expensive.
What do you think of this technology? Discuss in the 3D Printed Cube forum at 3DPB.com.
[Source: North Carolina State University]