http://www.engadget.com/2011/10/24/how-the-gadget-show-built-its-fps-simulator-video/

So they spent $600k on this? Seems like an awful lot, must've been that omni-directional treadmill.

That said, I need to have one.

Hardware:
5 Projectors @ 720p = <$5k
Geodesic Dome Screen=?
Kinect = $120
Omnidirectional treadmill=?
Paintball guns + image controller = <$800 (12 guns is a bit overkill)
Ambient LED lighting + controller = scalable $300+ (if you even want it to begin with)

And I have to believe you can find a better gun solution than what they were using.

OMG that is awesome!

I would find a way to use airsoft guns for the base for your controller, maybe with some wireless switches built into it?? I would use airsoft for the feedback guns as well so you don't mark up your screens with the rounds that don't hit you.

Dud

A few thoughts:

The whole colored ambient LED lighting thing doesn't really do anything for me. If I were to build something like this, the LEDs would come last, if at all.

Also, while it is a really neat idea, I'd also do without the paintball markers. If I were doing it as an actual training sim I'd totally throw it in, but just for my own enjoyment I'd leave it out.

The actual tracking of the gun was pretty neat, but using an iPhone as the mouse was unnecessary. I would stick the tracking they're using on an airsoft gun and shove a bluetooth mouse inside it, wiring left click to the trigger, and perhaps a pressure switch on the gunstock as right click to register looking down the sights when you actually shoulder your weapon. Although I'd have my weapon constantly shouldered, so that might not be the best solution. Maybe a non-working rail mounted light with the momentary ON switch as right click.

If you didn't want to do the whole 360 degree surround thing, you could use a Wii remote as the controller and one or two projectors. The problem with the Wiimote, however, is accuracy. It doesn't translate into 1:1 when you're aiming at the screen.

If you went with a rear projection and put a TrackIR just in front of the screen with the clip attached to the gun, that might work too.

Thinking about it a bit more, for the best experience you would need to track the gun in 3D space and have the actual display move with where you're aiming.

A better solution would be to track both head and gun. So the view moves to where you're looking and the reticle moves to where the gun is aimed.

My biggest issue with builds like this and the reason I've never pursued one is that the aiming never translates to 1:1. With everything I've seen, you're always going to get the issue like with the TrackIR where when your head is pointed one way, your eyes are always somewhere else. Even with the Gadget Show's build, when you aim up, the display doesn't move up, the view does, leaving you pointing your gun in the air while looking straight forward. For me, for full immersion, I need 1:1 aiming.

Overall, it's a brilliant build. The treadmill is really what ties the whole thing together. Using the Kinect is also a smart move. But the gun needs refining, as does the aiming system.

Another issue I see with it is the sound system. Speakers are static. They stay in one place while you would be moving around. This creates an issue with the directional sounds. When you start off facing the front of the screen, the speakers are oriented correctly and when you hear shots coming from the left, you turn to your left and can see where the shots are coming from. However, when you turn around and are facing the back of the screen, when shots are coming from your left in-game, they'll be coming out of the speaker to your right. Wireless directional headphones would solve this, but with paintball markers shooting rubber balls at you all the time, I'm not sure you'd want to risk a nice pair getting shot up.

given what they spended they could have used a custom built full hd HMD

Just got an email from MSE Weibull:

Thanks for your request regarding the ODF
Please excuse the delay in replying to you. Last period have been quite busy as you might imagine.

This will for sure create a truly unique arcade experience.

I assume you have seen the full Gadget show now available on the Youtube. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eg8Bh5iI2WY
As you can see from the comments there is big audience out there waiting for this. You are on the right track.

The gadget show setup was made by the TV team but we have the full Virtual Theater in our range as an integrated unit. All based on the ODF
MSE produces the hardware platform. Then we integrate virtually any game or simulator. Or provide the platform to any other integrator.
Whet was showed at the Gadget show was what we would call a “light” version. We are able to provide even much higher degrees of immersion and reality.

Our standard omni-directional floor has an active area which is 4 meters in diameter. This could be bigger or smaller if needed. The floor is designed in a modular way to facilitate such variations.
We supply the floor as a component, or as a subsystem in a complete Virtual Theatre, including simulation effects and much more.

A basic system includes the following:
- Omni-directional floor
- Tracking system (to decide the position of the user and calculate the speed of the floor)
- Control system

Optional add-ons to build a complete Virtual Theatre: (Not part of the Gadget show setup)
- Visual system
- Motion tracking
o Complete body tracking
o Hand tracking
- Effects, as
o Sound
o Smoke and smell
o Thermo
· Wind

· Ambient lightning

· Shoot-back

· Etc.


The basic platform with tracking and controls is about EUR 110 000.


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110k? Way more than I was expecting. We'll have to revisit in a couple years and see if their economy of scale has brought that price down.

!!! I hope the refill cartridges for this are cheap. Gonna be running low on the smell of blood, gunpowder and fear real quick.

But yeah, 110K seems a bit much. I wonder how much it would cost to build the omni-treadmill yourself? The static hardware is the easy part. I can figure that in my head. Getting the treadmill to move based on where you are standing on it is the hard part. You could probably hack a few arduinos to translate the tracking system into the proper movements for the motors for the treadmill. That shouldn't be too hard. But I don't really know how to track the movement. A configuration of high intensity IR LEDs aimed at a camera above you with some custom software interpreting their positions maybe?

Here's some shots of the treadmill setup pulled from youtube:





















This thread just became image heavy.

Looks like 16 individual treadmills, so 16 motors and a controller. Then you just layer Gravity Conveyor Rollers on top with enough friction so that the belts move them. Infrared camera tracks an infrared light on your helmet, and compares each frame to determine movement and directional speed.


This really doesn't seem all that difficult.

Looks like just 1 motor (blue unit in photo 8) connected to the gearing (white unit in photo 8) moving all treadmills by connection rods (image 4).

Yeah you're right, I wasn't looking at the gear. Well, that makes controlling it that much easier. What could we find to provide an off the shelf solution to the gearing?

I tried to do something very similar (except all the weird shooting your face and ambient lighting stuff of course) but the system has flaws that can't be overcome easily. Also there wasn't anyhting like kinect yet. It'd have some basics easier.

First of all I found projectors to be useless.
One of the biggest problems with projectors is that it's almost impossible to "feel" immerged. Yes, people believe otherwise because this is excitingly new to them and because they like the size - but after a while you notice the flaws.
With projectors you will always just stand in front of a wall. Imagine you go up close to a car in game and look though the side window, actually having to bow down a bit and aim lower, but all you really see is a GIANT window displayed across the room a few meters away from you and your brain says: what the hell? Not immervise.
Same goes for all situations of cover. You hide behind rock but there is no rock in front of your feet. There is that image 2 meters away from you. You brain again laughs at you hard.
Another key word here is depth of field although, interfaced corretly, this could be overcome from within the game.


Secondly there is the issue of aim tracking.
Aim tracking is bad. ArmA does much better in that regard. Humans do not rotate to look somewhere. We do 90% of the looking with our eyes and head movemennts. Even during body movements.
This is more or less an issue of the game though.


This said I put my project on hold for the following reasons.
- The inability to simulate anything beyond walking of flat concrete.
No matter how good you think it is. It's not. It's just outright weird to climb stairs, drive a vehicle, swim, ride, climb and even jump. Humans use all sorts of natural helpers to achieve their goals. For example we usually don't JUMP over a rock - we climb up and down. Even something as small as a fallen tree. We often put one foot on top etc. Leaning against a wall and looking around the corner? Good luck with that.
This will be extremely tough to overcome and this made me lose interest. It's literally that after a while you'll get annoyed by your body rampaging against all this abuse and your senses getting distorted.

- Better HUDs (head up displays) are neccessary in my opinion. Higher resolutions and eventually the ability to: track eye movements and most importantly: focus.
I could be motivated to start with this again as soon as they hit HD resolution without eye and focus tracking.

- Better tracking
tracking is in a sad state as we all know with natural point literally holding back all progress. Kinect may solve some of it but we still need high precision head tracking - something track natural point doesn't even intend to fix.
A real tracking input solution is needed. Flexible and generally accepted. NP with their weird infrared crap are totally holding everyone back. What about video? What about gyro? What about laser? There would be many other methods of tracking that would allow FULL 360, no, 3D tracking. Even FreeTrack could be changed to do this but we all know how that went.

- Better positional audio that hooks into tracking
Like someone said above you need to find a way to make fine adjustments to the sound axis. This could eventually be a software solution or an external hardware mixer. A software solution that hooks into the tracker would have the advantage though as it'd be less complicated hardware and thus could rely on one powerful and precise tracker that even knows the angles of the head itself (pitch and roll most importantly, yaw being obvious) as even the angle of the head changes the hearing, not just the rotation alone.



With kinect we have some powerful tool on the horizon. Sadly it's proprietary as TrackIR although Microsoft is very interested in pushing it forward while NaturalPoint has forgotten about innovation I guess.I assume it will greatly help resolving MANY of the issues I had.
For example controlling the treadmill speed and such. Imagine jumping forward with a leap. In real life you just touch the ground. In the sim you are greeted by the treadmill running at hefty speed to bring you back inward. Not only will you fall over but also you get the feeling of a car braking as backward inertia is generated.
I suggest 3meters as the radius for the mill and dynamic motion detection e.g. by the kinect. Jumps thus need to let you land and the slowly pull you back for example.



All in all it's becoming more reasonable to try this but it will still fail either due to the games, hardware or patents holding the industry back. In 5-10 years, after the 3d hype, I believe we'll see much more of this as holographic interaction is a focus of Mircosoft and thus kinect will certainly evolve into a very precise recognition device.
Considering the investments I'm still not motivated enough to continue my work on this. Seeing how much they want to sell this for is almost funny considering how disturbing these flaws felt to me.

Hmm, what about something like Sony's new HMZ-T1 with head tracking built in (freetrack could work easily, just mount a few IR leds), and somehow adapting the principle behind PS3's Move device for tracking a gun point? That way you can have a fixed camera and variable gun point.

Uh guys, your thinking about the movement platform backwards. That is not a motor. There is no motor. This is an input device, not output. i.e. the gears turn when you walk. Something reads the rpm of the gears as you walk causing the belts to turn.

I assume the IR detects what piece of the "pie" your in and then reads the rpm of the system and uses those two pieces of information to calculate direction and speed of movement. Their engineering on using a single rpm for the entire circle is nice.

Their price is probably a little high for their target market (military sims) but WAY high for commercial purposes. The reality is a bunch of inferred cameras, some slightly customized cargo systems (rollers, belts etc) and some custom software.

You could reproduce this with some parts from Conveyor Systems

Like all things simulator, ita the software integration that's always the hard part now a days.

In other words, although all those rollers look cool, the IR cameras do 80% of the work. The fancy platform is just there so you do not walk out of range of the cameras!

Nope, you would need a slope that increases toward the edge, and still the friction would be too great (through gearing and linkage) to "auto center" the player.
The player will be able to walk off the platform and the blue unit is too big for a sensor and is the size of an electric motor.

Incorrect. The blue device is a motor, and it turns all of the conveyor belts under the rollers at the same speed simultaneously. The IR cameras detect how far the user is out from the center, and adjusts the speed of the motor and thus the conveyor belts and rollers based on that and probably the speed the user is moving forward at. This is to maintain a position relative to the screen and re-center the user. With the rollers on flat ground and level, like they clearly are, even if they had amazing bearings, it wouldn't take much to walk off the edge if the rollers weren't pushing you back.

Looking through the pictures at how the whole platform is constructed, there can be no other explanation. The rollers sit on top of a conveyor belt, which is connected to the conveyor belts to it's left and right via a rotating shaft, and eventually to the blue box in question. The amount of friction that all these interconnected pieces would create means that by stepping off the center pedestal without the device operating, you would have no problem walking to and off the edge.

Basically, what JAMF said.

I'm guessing that the IR cameras do double duty in that in addition to controlling the speed of the rollers based on where the user is, they also provide the directional input based on the same data.

What do you think that the infrared-camera used? and what power the engine?