From: owner-3dui@hitl.washington.edu on behalf of Hannes Kaufmann
[a9225889@unet.univie.ac.at]
Sent: Friday, September 22, 2000 8:26 AM
To: Matthew Pilgrim
Cc: '3d-ui@hitl.washington.edu'
Subject: Re: ARToolKit - Input/output questions


> Matthew Pilgrim wrote:
> 
> 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.

Hi,
some comments in addition to those by Wolfgang Stuerzlinger.
Some inexpensive PC graphics cards allow simultanous use of 2 displays
e.g. monitor + svga out 
ATI Rage LT Pro in my Laptop does this for instance.

> 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?

I didn't work with the ARToolkit yet but for our mobile AR system
("Studierstube" system) we'll do some experiments with the Firewire
port. We want to use a normal DV camcorder (with a much higher
resolution than 320x240) attached via Firewire cable.
Firewire offers more than enough bandwidth and the camera is supposed to
output 50-60 images at the desired resolution.
If somebody has experience with using Firewire, I'd be very very
interested to hear about it. 
 
Good luck,

Hannes Kaufmann

-- 
Hannes Kaufmann                   - mailto:hannes@geometrek.com
Vienna University of Technology
Geometrek Web3D Solutions, CCO    - http://geometrek.com