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Welcome back, Jeri Ellsworth!
And welcome people who don’t normally listen to the show; if you came to hear Jeri, you won’t be disappointed! (until you hear Dave and Chris). Regardless, if you like what you hear and have interest in electronics (making them, not just using them), you can subscribe to our RSS feed or through our iTunes Podcast Feed.
For those interested, there is also now a transcript available for episode 147
- Jeri has joined us on past shows, in fact, she was our first guest on episode 35! The second time she was on the show (episode 52), she told us all about her home chip making escapades.
- Jeri and her partner Rick’s new company is called Technical Illusions. This company started after they were both laid off from Valve, the game company where they had previously been working on this technology.
- They recently revealed the castAR at Maker Faire in the San Mateo, CA.
- The Technical Illusion team is only 5 people full time right now, but they had many friends and cohorts along to help out during the show:
- Rick is able to quickly prototype new interactions and games by using Lua, the scripting language.
- Currently, Jeri is using Altera FPGAs for development and TI serializers to get the data to and from the video processor, but will eventually move to a metalized gate array. More expensive on a per-piece price than a fully custom chip but cheaper mask sets (for the photolithography part of semiconductor processing)
- The playing surface is a retroreflective surface, similar to what is on road signs and what the Apollo left on the surface of the moon.
- The sweet spot for viewing the games is at 100 Hz. They currently run the glasses at 120 Hz.
- The glasses and the absolute head tracking allow you to experience parallax, which you cannot do with 3D movies currently.
- The glasses hook up to phones through USB on the go. This allows the phone to act as a host or a device.
- There are other players in the Augmented Reality space, but no where near the price point they’re going for. In the Virtual Reality space, the OculusRift is a high profile example (at a similarly low cost)
- Technical Illusions will be seeking patents, in order to attract some investment. They will be starting a Kickstarter in the near future.
Photos of Jeri and the Technical Illusions team by Alvaro Prieto, friend of the show and great photographer!
Neeerdgasm. Love Jeri salvaging 100K chips stories, not to mention UPS on a plane đŸ˜€
Replacing 30K worth of tracking gear with cellphone camera and fpga? no more drifting relative positioning imu? ooo sooo good. Love it love it love it!
I could easily listen to couple of hours more of this.
The best episode yet. Thanks Jerri! Hope you make it over here to AU đŸ™‚
Can’t wait for your kickstarter.
Sucks to hear about getting laid off from Valve. Makes me second guess Valve’s upcoming hardware.
Not sure who in that photo (other than Jeri and Rick) are the 5 technical illusions employees, but it seems the company is anywhere from 40% to 80% female! For a tech company that is pretty huge.
We do have a strong female bias. We pick on poor Rick all the time. Too bad there isn’t an HR department for him yet.
Best episode! Good luck Jeri!
How well does the micro projector and retro reflector work at a distance like 10 or 15 feet away?
Would the brightness need to be cranked up more?
I can see ways to use it for more large scale AR
It works very well at distance over 10ft, since almost all of the light is returned to the user.
was thinking about how you could have a 10 foot grid of motorized retroreflective curtains, to split up a large room into a holodeck like enviroment, close curtains near the user to give them a screen to reflect off, and open them give them openings to walk thru
the 3d effect should allow you to put walls that dont fit the 10foot grid, and any other object
that just leaves the issue of other users getting in the way of the projection, simplest fix is a retroreflective suit, which would also allow the system to render a custom skin on every player
with some of those IR tracking led’s in the gloves, you could possibly also do clipping detection, and then trigger cellphone vib motors in the glove, to simulate contact
The product sounds like the closest thing to a real time hologram yet. When do we get a Princess Leia demo?
I can’t wait for the remake of the ’80s arcade game Gauntlet! Or Mario Cart, but more like a slot car set.
A couple of years ago, I remember seeing an implementation of a Real Time Strategy game (RTS) on the Microsoft Surface (Table sized version). It was like looking down on an interactive map. Taking that into 3d watching little tanks rolling over hills and interacting with them will get my wallet open.
Is it/(would it be) possible to stick a whole bunch of the retroreflective mats together to give a bigger area? Will the tracking system just detect an arbitrary number of “dots” if there are an appropriate number of modulation IDs?
It would be so cool to just plaster every surface in a room with this stuff. Excited to see some hardware in the wild!
Brian,
It is possible to place multiple pieces and identify them. The material is inexpensive, so it’s possible for large surfaces.
How inexpensive, carpet my floors, wall and ceiling inexpensive?
ANyway, i can’t wait to see it in person, any demo’s planned in europe? OHM2013 is coming up, hint, hint, wink, hint.
And didn’t Dave and Chris promise to go to the next hacking camp in europe? Better start planning guys
i think this stuff is compatible, but you would need to add the tracking markers
http://solutions.3m.com/wps/portal/3M/en_US/ScotchliteReflectiveMaterial/Scotchlite/
Could I have an entire room made out of the mats?
Does anyone else remember the TNG episode called The Game? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Game_%28Star_Trek:_The_Next_Generation%29
The project Jerri talked about reminds me of the game on that show.
I love the chance for a virtual tabletop. That is awesome.
Awesome show. I’m so Glad Valve released Jeri back out into the wild!
I’m glad that I get to be open about projects again.
When travelling on a plane, I’d like to use a laptop. Plug the glasses into HDMI and USB ports, have the reflective material covering the top of the laptop. Close the lid to enter 3D interactive mode.
That’s a cool idea. We thought about making a demo of a roll out screen for planes.
Would this work in an industrial environment?
I envisage having the “grey mats” on various industrial assets with barcodes on and the glasses detect the barcodes and provide a customised menu around that asset, eg a chemical tank could then project tank temperatures, analysis of the contents, warnings, maintenance manuals, standard operating procedures etc directly onto it..
I look forward to a development kit..
each IR tracking led is giving off a unique id, so its possible for every mat to be programmed with its own unique id, and just slapped on the side of a piece of equipment
you could then have anything on there, 3d internal diagram, that actually looks like an xray view inside the machine
directions on how to use/repair it, and if you had a network link, it could show live status of things
Every time I listen to Jeri I feel like a useless monkey.
Excellent episode, excellent project, excellent guest. Thank you.
Charlie.
That was a great interview! Definitely my favorite so far. This really got my imagination working over time with all of the possibilities. It was refreshing to hear someone talk so openly about business and technical details. I haven’t funded any kickstarter projects yet – this might have to be my first. I want to play with this stuff!