Why didn’t this ever take off? Just sitting at a computer it would be cool to just move left or right and feel like you looking into an environment. They could probably even pull this off with normal web cams now without anything else.

14 Comments

  1. Funny enough, Johnny Lee went on to work on the kinect!

  2. It’s pretty cool, one issue I can see however is that this would only work for one person’s perspective at a time, but I guess that’s how VR goggles work now too, so maybe that’s not as much as a hurdle.

  3. ned_poreyra

    I can’t really think of any way to enhance games gameplay-wise with this. In reality it’s still flat 2D, it’s just a visual effect. You can turn it off and the game works exactly the same way.

  4. mynameisollie

    I just think it’s a novelty. How often are people wanting to rock around in their chair whilst gaming? I think everyone has pretty much gotten over motion controls at this point. I’m assuming it will come back eventually as everything does.

  5. They do this with webcam in games like Star Citizen
    [https://github.com/opentrack/opentrack](https://github.com/opentrack/opentrack)
    [https://youtu.be/Rkh1dIS05F4](https://youtu.be/Rkh1dIS05F4)

    Bonus is that it also tracks facial expression and glance so your in game char can diagetically interact with the world, moving your character model head, smiling, lip syncing with our mic, etc

  6. I have this guess that it looks way better on a camera than it does IRL. Because IRL you have two eyes and they should see slightly different things and when they don’t I suspect it’s going to ruin the effect.

    That said as a PC FPS player I’d love to actually be able to lean a bit to peak around corners.

  7. chrisgilesphoto

    It’s great idea unless you already have things at the edge of the screen.

    ‘Where did my recycle bin disappear to. Again’

  8. steepleton

    the ipad used to do this. with head tracking from the camera making the icons seem to float above the desktop.

    never used it in anyother way tho

  9. Opentrack does this. It tracks your head and adjusts the ingame camera to match. It works quite well in flight sim and probably sim racing games that support it too.

  10. Lleonharte

    subtle but always really cool imo i like this so much

  11. NotRandomseer

    Portalgraph does what you’re talking about.

    Anyway most people who actually want immersion would go for vr

  12. Headless_Human

    Seems more like a gimmick. When I sit to play games why would I want to move around all the time and if i play something where I want to move a VR headset would be superior.

  13. harrisonisdead

    The Amazon Fire Phone had something like this. It four cameras around the screen to track the user’s movements. Utterly useless effect for a phone (it was used pretty much exclusively for dynamic wallpapers) but I could see it being more useful for gaming.

  14. CubitsTNE

    Looksley’s lino up used your eyes for head tracking on the dsi to create a 3d diorama effect.

    Combined with an ir emitter this was then used to stabilise the 3d on the new 3ds, with what the console saw being almost exactly how the wiimote worked.

    Opentrack on the pc is fairly commonly used for racing sims, employing a phone or webcam to mimick the trackir using visible light. Trackir is a head tracking system which dates back to the turn of the century.

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