| Author | Message | ||
     samh Rating: N/A |
This has been bugging me for forever and a day now. I laid out big $$ for the intersense intertrax head tracker to go with my i-glasses svga 3d about a year ago. Had a good time playing quake in 3d, but have been thinking that it should be possible to be, well, more.. productive in VR. Here is the issue: The i-glasses are only 800x600 resolution. That is a pretty lousy desktop size. They do come with a pretty neet desktop panning program, whereby you can set a virtual desktop to whatever size you need. The tracker then moves the view of the screen back and forth as you move your head. This would be awesome, except for the stupid A@$%@@% issue that has been bugging the @#$%@%@ out of me forever, and for which intersense has been 0 help. When you resize the desktop to something larger than 800x600, say something reasonable like 1280x1024, you can't resize any individual window to larger than 800x600. Stupid windows or more likely an incorrectly programmed desktop panning utility still thinks that the resolution is 800x600. So you can say run a session of 3d studio max or whatever.. you would think you would be able to sort of virtually look at this huge 1280x1024 or even larger screen, wearing the goggles and panning around by moving your head, using the tracker. Just as if you were looking at a huge 30" monitor on the desktop. How infuriating would it be to have a huge 30" monitor with like 4000x3000 pixels resolution and only be able to have a 8" x 5" 800x600 window right in the middle of it. you see my frustration So I am thinking I have seen the solution back in the day, possibly 10 years ago, back when monitors were small and resolutions were low. It was a utility that let you have a virtual desktop bigger than the physical resolution of the monitor. The view of the desktop would pan when the mouse got to the edge of the physical screen. I am thinking that if a program like this were running in addition to the intersense software it might solve the issue. The only other thing I can think of is maybe there is a registry key I can flip when I turn desktop panning on to tell windows what the 'virtual' resolution or quasi-max resolution should be. I think I have said enough. You know.. it is late at night, and I'll add a touch of philosophy here: I am going to boat building school in september, and I am having these huge reservations about it. Part of it is that I have spent most of my life (26 years) involved in one way or another with computers, science fiction and technology. Yes I have been sailing too, and building the crappy little rowing boat project on the side, but these infernal bleeping machines have really been the omnipresent force in my life. I dunno.. part of it is maybe political/ romantic Read too much Gibson and Stevenson and Sterling and Rucker and all the rest. And environmental: why should I destroy trees and use up petrolium based resources just to make physical things when there is this new digital fronteir that is totally undeveloped. (speaking of the 3d virtual reality fronteir.) And then someone says to me, "but you can't sail a 3d model of a boat." And thats true I guess... and maybe learning to build boats will in some way lead me to a knowledge set that will give me a better theoretical understanding so when I go to do something like Computer fluid dynamics I'll be better at it. But then I've always sucked at math, and what programming I have done hasn't been all that great.. so maybe I'm just a sci-fi fan and not really a hacker or anything. And who wants to read this confused drivel anyway. Its like that scene in fiddler on the roof: On one hand, on the other hand.. but for me, I never get to that pont where he goes "but there is no other hand." yours SH. | ||
| Anonymous Rating: N/A |
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