MIT students create Minority Report-style iPad control system (with video)

“Researchers at the MIT Media Lab have created a Minority Report-style glove and iPad input system for three-dimensional virtual object manipulation called T(ether),” Electronista reports.

“The system lets the team use motion tracking on gloves to create and alter virtual items with the iPads used as a point-of-view window to see what the users are manipulating,” Electronista reports. A demonstration video shows the system having multiple users simultaneously affecting the compter-generated world, both with and without the glove.”

Read more in the full article here.

“Not only can you reach into the virtual world and manipulate the objects you create there, but there’s a way to connect with others, locally or remotely, to collaborate within a shared 3D virtual space,” Rob LeFebvre reports for Cult of Mac. “Looks like all that virtual reality stuff from the late 1990s is coming around again, only with the iPad, an off-the-shelf computing system with plenty of power for this application.”

LeFebvre reports, “David Lakatos, one of the researchers involved with the T(ether) project, responded to our email asking about the system. He says, ‘The iPad is running an app compiled with the Cinder library, which is a C++ wrapper for openGL. We are not using the camera on the iPad – we use a Vicon motion-capture system (used in the film industry) to track the iPads location and orientation. The attached rectangle is what the motion-capture system tracks. By constantly tracking the 5 retroreflective dots on it, we can reconstruct the correct pose (position + orientation) of the iPad. We track the gloves with the same system.'”

Read more in the full article here.

MacDailyNews Take: Smell the glove!

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