Twirl is almost 3D immersion ready

At our University of Waterloo Fourth Year Design Project Symposium, we were having trouble with the IR light coming from the sun and a weird jitter that appeared out of no where.

Well we’ve fixed the cause of the jitter and implemented a Bad Light Detection algorithm for that pesky sun.

This means the head mount and 3D glasses should be safe to use for FULL 3D immersion! Not fully tested yet, but it should theoretically work. Oh and drawing will be a lot more stable now. Try writing your name in 3D!

Get CanvasSpace now!

Our 3D drawing/viewing program, CanvasSpace, is now ready for download! Click the “get CanvasSpace” button at http://www.twirl3d.com/ to download it now.

A Little Bit About Twirl

There’s two days before the 2010 design project symposium and we’ve almost completed our finishing touches on Twirl. I have to admit I’m a little psyched. Here’s a little history and what we’ve got on the way.

Back in 2009 we completed the core project — 3D tracking of an infra-red (IR) device and our 3D drawing application, CanvasSpace. The 3D tracking was done with system of IR sensors using Wii remotes, a wand which we’ve made to emit IR light, and some software to tie it all together.

For the 2010 symposium, we’re adding this website, head mount tracking, a giant upgrade in software, and a brand new zigbee wand with buttons! Tomorrow, we’ll be doing a full system run soon to see what things we’ve missed, but more importantly, to have a blast playing with our creations. I’m particularly interested in the new head tracking and drawing.

Gah! I can’t wait!

Head tracking works!

Head tracking is tracking the position of the user’s head and also which way they’re looking. We’ve been trying for a few days to interact with the 3D compass and get data from it. Then we feed that data into the drawing application, Canvas Space, so that the virtual world’s camera changes in accordance with the user’s head.

We got head tracking sort of working yesterday, but today we finally got it to be stable! With a combination of inbuilt averaging and our own concoction of a filter, it’s finally in usable condition. I suspect it will make the experience a lot more realistic with this .

Sharing just got easier

CanvasSpace, the application that listens to Twirl hardware and lets you draw in 3D, has implemented the portable network graphic (PNG) standard for saving files!  Although a PNG file is a 2D image, which takes advantage of lossless compression to stay small, the clever (and sometimes quirky) minded folk behind Twirl have managed to sneak in 3D data in a flat image.

What does this mean for you?  You can make a 3D creation, save it, and send it to anyone you please.  Your friends can then open up the file just like any other image with no extra software… it’s just a picture after all. If they want the full 3D experience, all they have to do is load the PNG file in CanvasSpace, and they’ve immediately got the full 3D creation on their computer.

Perfectly simple.

New PCB design sent out!

Sev finished the prototype circuit board for our new wand and sent it out today. Hopefully we can get it back sometime by Friday to put everything together. With one week to go things are finally coming together!