Who's gonna be the first? VR pit

I've been waiting for this for a while. it looks like Sony is introducing a 720p 3D HMD - the HMZ-T1.

http://www.engadget.com/2011/08/31/sonys-head-mounted-3d-visor-is-real-hmz-t1-arrives-in-japan-no/

It's got a dual 720p OLED panels, with effective FOV 45 degrees. Not wide enough yet for full immersion and it has no gyro/accelerometer.

Maybe we can hack up some optics for greater FOV and make some DIY head tracking and we have a virtual pit!

Haha, that is exactly what I thought of when I read about this earlier today!

This is something that I've been thinking about for quite a while, and as awesome as it would be, there are plenty of limitations.

Ignoring the low FOV and other limitations of the VR unit itself, the major problem I see is HAND tracking. It's all well and good to be able to sit in a fully realized virtual pit, but how are you going to track your hands and fingers to activate the virtual switches and buttons?

If you had a physical cockpit that was laid out exactly as the sim, it would take some practice, but eventually you could hit the real controls without needing hand tracking. But that would limit you to flying only one type of craft.

However, if you were somehow able to interface something like a Kinect with the sim, AND the sim was able to display a 3D hand in virtual space, AND all the controls in the sim were fully realized and programmed with collision detection or something similar so that your virtual finger activated them instead of clipping through them, AND there was also some sort of haptic feedback to give you a physical sensation when the controls were activated... THEN I think it could work.

But if you just want to use it as a 3D display with head tracking in a more-or-less static cockpit in a sim that isn't all that complicated, well that's cool too.

maybe these can be added into the mix
http://theperegrine.com/
the headset, Kinect and these gloves...

Would be a PITA since it's touch sensitive and would trigger when
grasping the HOTAS

However, if it would be tracked instead in roughly the same manner as a TIR tracks
then you could have it interface with the VR Pit and let you reach out and touch
controls in-game

Here's the 720p OLED HMD that Carl Zeiss has been flaunting at shows this year. Should be out around the same time as Sony's 720p OLED HMD:

Virtual reality updates obsolete A-10 trainer

http://www.sheppard.af.mil/news/story.asp?id=123055674

Yes! That's exactly what I was talking about!

One spec mentioned by some tech sites was a refresh of 0.01ms. If that is a reference to framerate, it would be 100 000Hz.

Doing some google searching and ended up finding this old thread. 720p? My how times have changed. At least I hope...