From: José Pascual Molina Massó <jpmolina@info-ab.uclm.es>
Date: August 15, 2003 4:59:03 AM EDT
To: 3d-ui@hitl.washington.edu
Subject: Re: Is there any standard in VR?

Hi,

Marc Bernatchez wrote:

"It is not a connected market in that each group of people
are doing on their own on their island. If we say that this is acceptable,
then, who needs standards?"

IMHO, even if the technology is not mature, there exist some standards in
VR. Apart from specific solutions, most VR applications rely on some
widely-known peripherals, such as the CyberGlove, Flock of Birds, i-glasses
or CrystalEyes, just to point out a few. One of the reasons is that they are
supported by most of existing VR software. On the other hand, the fact that
commercial and non-commercial VR toolkits support that set of peripherals is
one important reason for adding that kind of devices to your VR set, just
for the sake of compatibility. VR sets are expensive, so you must be sure
that your modeller can import files to your VR toolkit, that your VR toolkit
can record data from your tracker and gloves and that you can output stereo
images to your helmet. That's why we need standards.

Of course, there are other peripherals that are not so widely-supported but
that are also useful. For that purpose, VR toolkits often include a SDK that
allows you to create your own device handlers for your specific peripherals.
However, writing new libraries is time consuming and, in that sense, VR
software companies can be blamed for not updating their device support list
more often. The solution may be open source projects such as VR Juggler:

http://www.vrjuggler.org


José Pascual


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José Pascual Molina Massó
Departamento de Informática
Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha

Escuela Politécnica Superior de Albacete
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E-mail: jpmolina@info-ab.uclm.es
Alias: JosePascual.Molina@uclm.es
Web: www.info-ab.uclm.es/personal/jpmolina
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