From: owner-3dui@hitl.washington.edu on behalf of Matthew Pilgrim [matthew.pilgrim@arup.com] Sent: Tuesday, September 19, 2000 12:26 PM To: '3d-ui@hitl.washington.edu' Subject: ARToolKit - Input/output questions Dear all, I have been using the ARToolkit for windows with a USB camera and a standard graphics card/monitor for sometime now but would like to move on to use a HMD to develop AR applications similar to that shown by Mark Billinghurst and co. at SIGGRAPH2000. We have converted a lot of the toolkit to run in a MFC window under Windows 95/NT/2000 (I maybe able to supply this to interested parties!) and would like some advise on the following: 1) Most of the applications I have seen have been running on an SG where a small view of the AR scene is shown in a window on the monitor and a full screen version piped to the Glasstron HMD. Is this a function of the graphics card/driver or is it done via software? We have a Hercules graphics card with s-video out but are only capable of viewing the image either via the HMD or the monitor but not both together. 2) ARToolkit documentation suggests that you can use (in theory) any camera supported by Video for Windows. So if I buy a video capture card that has an s-video in port and a tiny TV camera and connect them together I will then be dependent on their being a correct driver available, is this correct? Has anyone done this? 3) As mentioned earlier I have a USB camera (Logitech) working but this is limited to 320*240 resolution and looks terrible when scaled to 800*600 for s-video. Has anyone found a USB camera that gives suitable resolution and refresh rates which is small enough to be head mounted? 4) Finally, the glDrawPixels OpenGL function is extremely slow on the PC and infacts seems to conflict with the Hercules graphics card (symptoms include - just won't render to screen!). Has anyone had similar experience and/or tried any alternatives E.g. rendering the video image to a texture on a 2D surface? Thanks for your attention, Matthew Arup Research & Development