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3 authors:
Mario Lorenz
Technische Universität Chemnitz
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Most applications for immersive virtual environments are of which with a native resolution of 1024*768 pixels and a
built to allow slow or medium speed user interaction. brightness of 3000 Ansi Lumens. Each beamer is mounted
Examples of this kind of interaction include: changing the to custom mechanics supporting 5 DOF adjustment. This
position of an object, triggering an action or setting a allows an exact positioning of the left eye beamer’s optical
control parameter. To broaden the range of application for system to avoid geometric distortions, e.g. keystoning.
VR systems it seems necessary to integrate technologies Since we are able to align the tiles exactly we do not need
that allow faster movements of the user in a virtual to deal with edge blending and overlap areas. For
environment. This raises the question what response times separation between left and right images we use a linear
can be achieved with VR systems built from standard recent polarization filter system with 72 percent transmission of
hardware components. To answer this question we decided the pre-polarized light sent from the LCD beamers. Circular
to realize a table tennis simulation because this game polarization can be done by adding a quarter plate to the
involves very fast movements and has moderate space filter system.
requirements. In this article we report on the realization of
our immersive table tennis simulation V-Pong that has been
presented on major events as IEEE VR2005 and Cebit2006.
1. HARDWARE
The hardware for this application consists of three major
components: the projection system, the tracking system and
the application host.
Obviously a front projection system is not appropriate for a
simulation where the user performs fast movements in front
of the projection wall. Therefore we realized a rear
projection system based on standard components. To
achieve the sensation of immersion the projection wall has
to be quite large. Consequently we constructed a frame to
hold two acryl glass panels yielding a single screen of
dimensions 4x3m. To reduce weight we use relatively thin
glass with a thickness of 5mm. From the different types of figure 1: rear projection with 8 beamers
panels we chose the medium ones (gain 2.5, half angle 52
degrees) to achieve the best compromise between visual Each projector is driven by one graphics pipeline using
quality, contrast and viewing angle dependency. digital signaling (DVI). The necessary parallel rendering is
For the first version of the projection system we used only done on 8 GeForce 7800GTX graphics cards. Therefore 8
two LCD beamers. As a result the pixel raster could be seen PCs are connected with 2 separate copper Gigabit networks.
by the player and the brightness was to low to play under Since our Virtual Table Tennis is a single instance
daylight conditions. For the second version we subdivided application we had to develop a parallel GL rendering
the whole display area into four tiles to achieve a suitable interface based on the Chromium framework. Thereto we
resolution as well as an adequate brightness for daylight added some new functionality to the Chromium framework
presentations. For the tiled display we had to develop a low to allow fast and synchronized rendering.
cost projector array as well as a rendering cluster to drive
this mosaic. When driving tiled displays using a sort-first configuration
based on the Tilesort stream procession unit (SPU) the
Each screen tile shows stereoscopic image pairs of the performance bottlenecks are the high utilization of the
corresponding frame area. To project the stereoscopic client host caused by the expensive sorting and bucketing of
images we use per tile two PLC-XU58 LCD projectors each geometry and the high bandwidth consumption caused by a
significant amount of redundant unicast transmissions. We For the rules of the game a special plug-in has been created.
addressed these problems with an implementation of a true To control the set-up of the game we provide intuitive
point-to-multipoint connection type using UDP multicast. interaction techniques. The user can use the second hand to
In addition we integrated different optimizations to adjust the level of the game with a simple device that uses
eliminate the transfer of redundant information. As a result three thimbles attached to the thumb, the middle and the
our parallel interface allows to render large scenes index finger. Reset and Replay can be triggered by certain
synchronously on an arbitary number of tiles at nearly gestures of the player .
constant performance [2].
different skill levels for the opponent that can be chosen by 1200
the user. By reducing the level the user takes influence on 1000
the different properties of his opponent. One important 800
factor is the height above the net that is chosen for the 600
return. Other factors include the maximum speed of the
400
racket and an artificially introduced time delay. This delay
involves a constant value that corresponds to a reaction 200
time and a variable value that depends on the distance the 0 ms
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virtual player has to move to perform the return. This delay
time may cause the player to miss the ball or to hit it at a
different position as intended. Furthermore, we included a
random noise function in the computation of the parameters
for an optimal return of the ball. The amplitude of the noise figure 4: position prediction diagram of a racket
function is decreased for higher game levels but increases movement
over the time the ball is played without interruptions. This
intends to model an increasing likeliness of mistakes when Figure 4 shows the position prediction diagram for the z
the ball is successfully returned for a long time. coordinate (approximately the distance to the screen) of a
moving racket. The x-axis shows the simulation time in
4. Prediction milliseconds. The ball was hit at 38105ms. It can be
The major difficulty in the design of this application is the observed that the predicted movement has higher energy
synchronization of the players movement with the visual and more jittering. But it’s clearly noticeable that the error
output. Our system consists of several components each of between real position and predicted position at the time of
which contributes to the delay between the movements of collision is very small.
5. Results and Perspectives
With our implementation we have shown that the high
requirements of a table tennis simulation can be met with
recent hardware. We presented the system at events as
IEEE VR2005 and Cebit06. At these instances we found
that users with no experience with VR environments can
use our system without any introduction. The reason for this
is the closeness of our simulation to a real table tennis
environment. This is achieved by the realistic video and
audio output and the familiar input device. The complete
environment is immediately accepted by the users. Users
who are familiar with VR environments are mostly
impressed by the fast response of the system. The third
group of users is formed by the table tennis players. They
confirmed the nearly realistic behavior of the system with
respect to the ball motion including the influence of spin.
However, since they perform much faster movements than figure 5: VR 2005, March 12-16th 2005, Bonn-Germany
other users the limits of the simulation with respect to
correct prediction become obvious.
We realized that the sensation of immersion created by our 6. References
system is very high. Very often we noticed that users tried
to put the racket on the table after finishing the game. [1] S. Rusdorf, M. Lorenz, S. Wölk, G. Brunnett: Virtualiti3D:
Sometimes very enthusiastic players hit the screen with the A System-Independent, Real Time-Animated, Three-
racket. These incidents indicate that the player seems to Dimensional Graphical User Interface, Proc. of IASTED
forget what the environment really looks like. Conf. on Vis., Imag. & Image Proc. 03 , pp. 955-960, Acta
Press 2003, ISSN 1482-7921.
Further developments will concern the distribution of our
[2] Lorenz, M., Brunnett, G.: Optimized Visualization for Tiled
application to allow two remote human users to play against Displays, Proc. of Eurographics Symp. on Parallel Graphics
each other. For this it will be necessary to cope with the and Vis. 2006, see also: Technical Report 02/06, Dept. of
network latency. Furthermore, we plan to realize a table Comp. Science, Chemnitz University of Technology, 2006,
tennis simulation with multi-user support on a single screen. ISSN 0947-5125.
This will allow us to realize table tennis doubles. We also [3] Rusdorf, St./Brunnett, G.: Real Time Tracking of High Speed
intend to integrate a haptic feedback for the ball collision Movements in the Context of a Table Tennis Application,
with the racket in our simulation. Proc. ACM Symposium on Virtual Reality Software and
Technology 2005, pp. 192-201, ACM 2005, ISBN 1-59593-
098-1.