#Good VR Book
11 messages in this thread
Hey all…
Just thought I'd pop up a message regarding a good Virtual Reality
book I started reading, called "Silicon Mirage – The art and science of Virtual
Reality" by Steve Aukstakalnis & David Blatner. I really wanted to post this
message once I finished reading the book but the way I read….well we really
didn't want to have the info that much out of date did we <g>.
Anyway the book gives an excellent overview of the field in simple easy
to read language. It provides a foundation of the way humans percieve reality
then goes on to explain the what researchers in the field have been doing to
develop realistic computer generated environments. I'm only 100 pages into
this 300 page book but if the rest is anything like the begining then I have no
qualms about recommending it to anyone interested in an introduction to VR.
Its available from Peachpit Press and I paid 23$ including shipping. Its
cool and lots of pictures!
Roger C@V
Thanks for the "book review" roger. Care to send in this information to be
included in one of our new "Learning Curve" newsletters that we will be
publishing for LSG partners? Would make a great addition to this.
You (and others) might want to contact John Morrison at the CAD Institute for
more books and information sources. John is heading up some major initiatives
in VR including a full degree program and some graduate courses in VR. He has
quite a list of books on the topic.
wayne
Wayne…
I'll send more complete info once I'm finished the book…half read book
reviews don't wash I quess… and thanks for the referal Is Jim online ??
Roger C@V
John that is Roger! Not sure that he is online, certainly does not have any
"presence" here. Why not give him a phone call and push him to get with it and
join the revolution! <g>
wayne
Wayne, Roger et. al.,
The Mecklar (sp?) VR conference in San Jose is in May I believe, and is
supposed to be the big one for VR, is featuring our own John Morrison as a
presenter. We at Clackamas are just getting into VR with the Sense8 WorldTool
Kit software. It's up and running, and we're looking to get a headmounted
display of some sort next. We may try to send someone to the San Jose
conference. There is another VR conference oriented to disabilities in S.F. in
July I think. I will post that here when I find it.
Shoe
Terence,
"Virtual Reality and Persons with Disabilities" is being held June 17-18 at
the Westin Hotel, Millbrae CA (near SF airport).
The conference is being sponsored by Cal State Univ, Northridge (CSUN) and
co-sponsored by Greenleaf Medical Systems, CyberEdge Journal, Pacific Bell and
the California Dept of Rehabilitation. March 1 was deadline for papers and
other proposals, but if you got any ideas, i'm sure they will be considered!
for more info contact:
Dr. Harry J. Murphy
Office of Disabled Student Services
CSUN
18111 Nordhoff Street -DVSS
Northridge, CA 91330
phone (818) 885-2578 V/TDD
fax: 818 885 4929
email: vr@vax.csun.edu
compuserve: Harry Murphy 71740,2745
Jerry,
Thanks for filling us in, saves me the research. I downloaded and printed your
paper the other day and will give it to our VR developer tomorrow.
Shoe
Shoe,
Do you remember the name of the VR forum here on CIS? The merge going on with
3D rapid prototyping and VR is exciting. I was to attend Gerge Gonsales AMP
conference on this at the end of Feb but had to cancel at the last moment.
There are just so many neat things happening at once now days, it's really
exciting. Spent a good part of the day exploring Acad R12 for Win3.1 and I say
WOW WOW. Combine this with Corel draw, Photostyler, PageMaker, Graphic Impact
3D Studio 2.x and AniPro 1.3 and authoring and sound creation software and the
limits are all but gone. The neat thing about Photosyler is the ability to play
with the Acad dwg and merge in a 3ds Targa file that is resolved far above what
one can do in 3ds alone. Playing with lighting design today I was WoW'ed many
times over ( yes Vernon is sometimes easily Wow'ed) but This new windows
version says to me that new professional users should buy it 1st and skip the
dos version. (Now all I need is that Time Expansion module and to find the
button called "Expand above 24hrs/day"<g>)
Congrats to the team that built this new windows package—-WOW
PAT
PS: I knew I did the right thing when I speced out 64 meg expansion and a min
of a 230MB drive for our new machines. Seems like 16mb ram is ground zero now.
Pat,
The GRAPHDEV forum is where the VR guys hang out.
Shoe
roger,
and for the simple quick intro to VR from the homebrew perspective, pop over
to GRAPHDEV forum and download WHATVR.ZIP from Lib 10 (VR Concepts).
You might also be interested in DEMO4.ZIP from Lib 11 (VR Tech). That is a
public domain VR program called Rend386. It runs on 386 PCs under DOS (also
works after a fashion on Windows and OS/2 i understand). Full source code is in
Devel4.zip, also in Lib 11.
Btw, would the Autodesk folks please post the Cyberspace Dev Kit Press Release
to the GraphDev VR Tech library (#11)? There are a lot of folks over there who
would be interested in reading it.
Thanks
Jerry Isdale
Hey Jerry…
Thanks for the info.. don't mind if I mosey over to the gravdev froum..
Public domain VR well that sounds really cool…
About posting the cyberspace announcement post you message to one of the
syops and they will most like accomodate your request….
Thanks Roger C@V