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Virtual Sword Fighting
Posted by
michael
on Sat Jul 27, 2002 06:50 PM
from the sword-sword-revolution dept.
from the sword-sword-revolution dept.
Faeton writes "SIGGRAPH is on, and Extremetech has the scoop on it. From Nvidia's N30 to ATI's monster 4x Radeon 9700 render board, the coolest thing was the virtual sword fighting simulator. With a VR headset and a gyroscopic force-feedback "sword", you could really be the badass knight you've always dreamed of. I want this at a local arcade soon!"
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Midevil Knight? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Midevil Knight? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Midevil Knight? (Score:2)
run away! run away!
Re:Midevil Knight? (Score:2, Funny)
run away! run away!
Re:Midevil Knight? (Score:2, Funny)
>to recreate a certain Monty Python and the Holy
>Grail scene
First the spankings, then the oral sex?
The force feedback isn't THAT good...
-l
Re:Midevil Knight? (Score:2)
I think you misspelled Snow Crash.
Re:Midevil Knight? (Score:2)
Rotating 360 Degree display (Score:2)
Re:Rotating 360 Degree display (Score:3, Informative)
I watched Highlander a bit too much (Score:2, Funny)
Re:I watched Highlander a bit too much (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re:I watched Highlander a bit too much (Score:2, Offtopic)
I have an ex-girlfriend that used to be a big SCA fan, she has some pretty neat swords and didn't mind using them. She's now married and 5 months pregnant and I long ago decided not to have children, I'd say the odds are good that sword play doesn't hurt your procreative chances. I for one had an ancestor that killed three of his playmates with his first sword, on his 10th b-day no less.
I'd rather play with that gyro sword from e-tech and you can see where that path has led....
Re:I watched Highlander a bit too much (Score:4, Funny)
I for one had an ancestor that killed three of his playmates with his first sword, on his 10th b-day no less.
---snip
ok, I'll bite...his _first_ sword? You mean he was given another one after this?
Parent
Re:I watched Highlander a bit too much (Score:2, Offtopic)
When he was older, they didn't have prisons back then, so either you were executed or not, and well he was only ten. You weren't allowed to leave the county if you owed money, so not everything got you executed. Someone later in life stuck an ax in his head and he is said to have killed him too, but I guess that was considered legitimite. Archeologists dug up his body a few years ago and verified that he lived long after the ax injury (that is the bone regrew.)
Please refrain from.... (Score:2, Funny)
2) Any mention in reference to the "vibrating stick".
3) Any polls that mention prOn or "vibrating stick" with a CmdrTaco last-choice.
4) Creating any troll-ific "Please refain from" lists.
Great... (Score:2, Funny)
I have to contend with sword-fights at all the local bars... now I get to do the same on my computer.
*twirls finger in air*
Good Concept but too much equipment (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Good Concept but too much equipment (Score:3, Informative)
SGI VAN ("Visual Area Networking") (Score:3, Informative)
SGI was showing off some examples of what you are describing. Basicly, the big iron (clusters, or large machines such as Onyxes) sit in the machine room, while the users have wireless webpads and such elsewhere. It's the only way we can currently tap the power of thousands of processors and dozens of 3D accelerators in a handheld using current technology.
http://www.sgi.com/visualization/van/ [sgi.com]
Re:Good Concept but too much equipment (Score:3, Interesting)
Graphics have always been the easiest part of building a VR rig; it's the user interface that's the hard part.
Radio links would indeed work for the control devices, but shoving full-motion video through the link with acceptable resolution and low latency would be trickier (recent wireless kits can likely do it, with difficulty). Also bear in mind that many of these rigs use EM-based position sensors. Nearby radio transmissions could quite possibly screw this up if it's being used.
Biggest killer of current VR technology for me (besides the price)? The display. I like having a decent field of view with decent resolution. Current head-mounted displays aren't there yet (and a CAVE-type solution is a bit bulky/costly).
Historically, fast and accurate head-motion tracking has been a problem as well (even a slight lag causes simulator sickness). This may have improved in recent years (haven't kept up with the field).
VR rigs are really cool toys, but nobody's figured out how to build a really _good_ one yet that I know of.
So. . .. (Score:2)
(My idea was using off the shelf equipment though, and the controller had an estimated price of ~$90-$120, and was wireless to boot. No forcefeed back obviously, heh, would've required tons of batteries for that.
The Big Guns at SIGGRAPH (Score:5, Interesting)
SGI [sgi.com] annouced their Infinite Reality 4 [sgi.com] option for the Onyx series... comes standard with 1gbyte of texture ram and 2.5gbyte of buffer, expandable to 10gbyte of buffer for a total of 11gbyte of onboard gfx ram. Up to 16 IR4 subsystems can be installed in a single machine. Each subsystem can drive up to 8 monitors... or all subsystems can run in parallel for greater performance. The Virtual LA Urban Simulation project [ucla.edu] demoed part of their 3D LA using IR4 and the older IR3. They currently have over 1TB of texture and geometry data from Los Angeles, mostly in downtown areas... though they have 20,000 square miles mapped out, 4,000 of which are quite detailed.
Sun [sun.com] was showing off their XVR-4000 gfx option, a cardset that uses the IPA slot found in most Ultra-series machines. It has about 8x the geometry performance of IR3 and about 50% of the fill performance of IR4... for a fraction of the cost. 1gbyte of texture and 144mbyte of buffer. Different market targets, but interesting none the less.
Re:The Big Guns at SIGGRAPH (Score:2)
Combine that with SGI's sudden idea to start selling x86 systems running linux, and I was sure that they were only a year or two away from closing shop.
It's good to see them finally getting back to what they were always good at. Making video cards that performed admiringly well when given tasks that would bring the competition to it's knees, and putting together the systems with the custom busses required to push these cards.
Anyways, enough of "yay SGI".
It's also nice to see Sun finally getting in on the high level gfx market as well. I've always favored Sun when it came to selecting Unix servers. It's nice to see that they have an offering for the gfx market as well.
Re:The Big Guns at SIGGRAPH (Score:2)
Yeah, it's interesting that there's a distinct correlation between SGI's dropping all of their x86-based workstations and servers and their being able to actually squeak out a tiny profit one recent quarter.
I guess the lesson there is, "don't build stuff that people won't buy."
Re:The Big Guns at SIGGRAPH (Score:5, Interesting)
InfiniteReality (be it the original IR on Onyx, or IR2, IR2E, IR3, or now IR4) is comprised of a set of boards. In order to function, the set has to include one geometry engine (or GE), one raster manager (or RM), and one display generator (or DG). The GE board is where the graphics coprocessors live, and it's responsible for most of the 3D math. The DG converts the frame buffer into an analog RGB signal, or a CCIR-601 SD video signal, or, recently, a digital signal.
The RMs are the interesting part. The RM board holds both the frame buffer (80 MB on IR3, 2.5 GB on IR4) and the texture RAM (256 MB on IR3, 1 GB on IR4). A graphics pipe can include one, two, or four raster managers. When you add RMs, you increase frame buffer size (or the size of the raster you can render), but texture cache.
So a four RM graphics pipe will have 10 GB of frame buffer and 1 GB of texture cache, but that 1 GB of texture will be on each of the four RMs. So each texture you download will be stored, in parallel, on each of the four RMs. This keeps texture operations nice and peppy even when you're rendering into a 3840 x 2160 buffer. (That's four times more resolution than HDTV, if you're interested.)
Note, also, that these memories aren't combined. The TRAM and the frame buffer RAM are isolated in hardware. You can't store textures in the frame buffer, and you can't render in texture RAM. So saying that IR4 has a combined 11 GB of graphics RAM is not quite true, and slightly misleading. But only slightly.
The whole thing adds up to an incredibly flexible system. You can configure the graphics pipe as a relatively small raster of 2,048-bit-deep pixels, or an 8-million-pixel raster of 256-bit-deep pixels, or almost anything in between. You can render a truly giant image-- about 3K by 2K pixels, progressive scan, or even more than that if you're willing to live with interlacing-- with full antialiasing, multi-buffered. It's pretty.
(If all you want is pure geometry performance, for viewing giant CAD models and stuff in real time in a VR environment, SGI also has their InfinitePerformance line of graphics hardware for Onyx. But that's another topic.)
Okay, that's enough "Rah-rah, IR" for one night, with just one more little piece of trivia. InfiniteReality graphics has remained fundamentally unchanged since 1996 or so. The only exception is the change from an Everest bus host to an XIO host system. Every few years, SGI has increased the speed of the GEs, or the texture capacity on the RMs, or the performance of the DACs in the DG, but the system itself hasn't really changed at all in six or seven years. That's pretty amazing.
Parent
Re:The Big Guns at SIGGRAPH (Score:3, Informative)
When you say "32 bits per pixel," you're talking about output pixel depth and format. A pixel in RGBA8 format stores one byte for each of red, green, blue, and alpha, and no other data. Those 32 bits are used by the DACs on the hardware to generate a component RGB video signal to drive your monitor. (Or, as I said before, a digital signal, but I'm not familiar with digital signal formats, so I get a little fuzzy at that point.)
IR doesn't support RGB8 or RGBA8; it uses either RGB10 (the default), in which 10 bits are used for each of red, green, and blue (not sure of the packing used), RGBA10 (adds alpha), or RGB12 (12 bpp).
On top of the color data, you can have a second buffer (used to eliminate image flicker in real-time animations), stereoscopic buffers (rendering two different images into the same buffer and display them through special stereo viewing hardware), auxiliary buffers (used for off-screen rendering in hardware; glCopyPixels() can copy aux buffer pixels into the visible frame buffer), multisample antialiasing, Z-buffering, and so on.
As I understand it from my vis sim buddies, it's really not that hard to fill up a 256 bit pixel in a real time image generator. They use 1 Kbit and 2 Kbit pixels pretty often.
Here's an example of a visual available on my Onyx2 at the office:
Visual ID: 6b depth=24 class=TrueColor
bufferSize=48 level=0 renderType=rgba doubleBuffer=1 stereo=1
rgba: redSize=12 greenSize=12 blueSize=12 alphaSize=12
auxBuffers=1 depthSize=23 stencilSize=8
accum: redSize=32 greenSize=32 blueSize=32 alphaSize=32
multiSample=4 multiSampleBuffers=1
Opaque.
I wish I could tell you what everything in there means, but most of it is beyond me.
Insert gratuitous (Score:3, Funny)
What? What did you expect to follow "insert"? Get your mind out of the gutter. :)
parent Hiro Protagonist reference needs modding up (Score:2)
Perhaps a better question, does/should Neal Stephenson constitute core literacy for a Geek crowd?
Re:parent Hiro Protagonist reference needs modding (Score:2)
Some nice possible application (Score:2, Interesting)
Would be nice to know that in the future one could just don a VR headset and practice any sort of exotic martial arts
Probably safer for getting initiated into using sharp weapons as well..
Nice,
Michel
Remote Kendo? No way. (Score:2)
And nowhere else.
You must see every little contraction of his iris, every slight flick of eyelid.
Lose concentration for one thousandth of a second and the next thing you know your head has been split in two.
No VR system is gonna allow you to do that.
Great sport anyway.
Not at a local arcade near you (Score:5, Interesting)
This might be slightly off-topic, but it has to be remembered that since the 80s, arcades have REALLY had tough times.
Back in the 70s and 80s, the cost of the best games and technology was prohibitively high, so arcades did good business. Since the mid 90s (pretty much since PlayStation), however, you can buy something just as powerful as an arcade machine for home use and you don't need to go to the arcade at all.
I am somewhat saddened by the 'fall' of the arcade, and think they add a great social aspect to gaming. Imagine modern day arcades with 16 player Quake 3 style shoot-em-ups.. but it ain't going to happen for most arcades. Most arcades these days still have their crappy early 90s games (Test Drive, Sega Rally, etc) along with a bunch of lame shooting games.
Arcades are for tourists nowadays, not serious gamers. And that is sad.
Re:Not at a local arcade near you (Score:2)
Re:Not at a local arcade near you (Score:2)
Well, I remember in the 80s (post 83 or so), arcades had pretty much the same games you could play at home. You had asteroids, pac-man, paperboy, duck hunt, games like that. The only value the arcade added was social value, and unique control systems that the home games didn't have. What was under the hood was mostly the same thing you could buy for home use.
There may have been a brief period in the early to mid 90s where arcade technology outstripped home technology, but I don't really know much about that period in arcade, the number of times I have been to an arcade since the early 90s is few.
Re:Not at a local arcade near you (Score:3, Insightful)
As for arcade games having tough times, Namco and Konami are keeping them alive by offering games that aren't quite as good on consoles/PCs as in the arcade. Examples of games like this are Dance Dance Revolution (unless you build your own hard pad, it's not the same as the arcade), Percussion Freaks (play drums, like DDR except with a drum set), and Para Para Dancing (wave your arms around). Yes, arcades aren't as popular as they used to be, but that doesn't mean the arcade is dead yet or that they're crappy.
Re:Not at a local arcade near you (Score:3, Insightful)
to combat the increasing power of home consoles, they've added large site-specific attractions that can't be replicated at home. dance dance revolution, that boxing game, the snowboarding simulater etc.
arcades are doing fine
the problem with this, for many slashdotter, i'm sure, is the people at the arcades. these kids never played kid icarus. they weren't into the video games/action figgures/comic books scene as little kids. no, they got together on the weekend and played sports. *sports* for god's sake! and now they're in arcades, our turf. it hurts.
My one-and-only shot at live action role-playing.. (Score:5, Funny)
Armed with my foam sword, and utterly unable to use it, I cheerfully bumbled about with the rest of 'em, swishing the odd swish and generally having a good time.
Until I came up against Nick.
Now Nick is an interesting person. He has reactions like no-one else I've ever played against in anything. To give an idea, I had never been defeated in air-hockey by anyone I played (and I played a lot) until I played Nick. And Nick I never beat even once...
Back onto the role-playing session, and in my wanderings I ran into Nick, who was holding two rather better constructed foam swords. Turning to me, he did some ridiculously cool flick with both hands - crossing swords whilst swinging them, like you see in the old pirate films - and began his advance.
Role-playing to the hilt, I briefly considered. "What would my character do in this situation? Would he a) buckle his swash and fight like a man or b) flee like the cringing curr he really is?".
I ran like hell...
Cheers,
Ian
Re:My one-and-only shot at live action role-playin (Score:4, Interesting)
Parent
Keep it virtual (Score:3)
Foam weapons would have been good in that situation, even though the few rare combats were actually run by dice rolls and cards. I think anytime adults play at fighting and heavy objects are involved there should be either protective gear or a lot of empty space sepating the business end of the blunt object and the target (eg. virtual fighting on opposite sides of the room).
As a kid I used to thump at other kids with a six foot wooden staff (the nature of monkey was irrepressible), but that usually involved hitting at the other kids staff or lots of slow motion theatrical stuff. If a kid with a blunt object loses it people are less likely to get hurt than if an adult loses it.
With something like this setup and two people in the same room with virtual headsets I can forsee someone beating the guy in marketing to a bloody pulp with the gyroscopicly stablised VR sword during what would start as a friendly game. Keep it virtual, stay in your corner.
Go to Disney World. (Score:2, Interesting)
Serious waivers ahead (Score:3, Funny)
One of the more amusing displays was this sword-fighting simulator that used a VR headset along with a "virtual sword" that had two gyro motors running it that allowed for tactile force feedback. Apparently, one overly exuberant combatant in a moment of pique jumped up to deliver the death-blow, and upon landing smashed the sword into one of the posts you see in this picture, leaving it in pieces, and the device's creators nearly in tears. But, they were able to put Humpty Dumpty back together again, and the virtual combat raged on. This system also used multi-channel audio to help the player localize sounds and better immerse them in the scene, and also used video compositing to put an image of that particular player into the rendered 3D scene.
If this became a home entertainment unit, can you imagine the sort of waiver the company would want the average geek to sign before using it?
"The undersigned (hereafter, "they") agrees that Swashing Buckles Incorporated (hereafter, "we") were just sitting around innocently when the undersigned came in and DEMANDED to be given one of these virtual sword units, despite the fact that we warned them OVER and OVER that they hadn't done anything more strenuous than click a mouse in TEN YEARS, and therefore would ALMOST CERTAINLY strain EVERY MUSCLE IN THEIR BODY within minutes of engaging in a virtual battle. The undersigned further agrees that we warned them that they would QUITE LIKELY destroy a valued POSSESSION, PET, or LOVED ONE, while leaping about blindly inside the virtual reality helmet. The undersigned agrees NOT TO COME CRYING TO US when these things happen."
Sword fighting in the arcade (Score:2, Informative)
Bilestoad's (Score:2)
qwe iop
asd kl;
zxc
You must be kidding me - SIGGRAPH was MUCH more... (Score:3, Informative)
Really, SIGGRAPH was NOT just an exhibition floor with cheesey swag (although the little green LED lights were very nice) and some cool new toys. It was presentation after presentation by resesarchers, some barely able to speak engrish, but all excited about their work and open to collaboration. It was hours and hours of animation, some (Like Allain Escalle's "Le Conte du monde flottant") were so stunning as to make you forget where animation ended and life began. Disney's work on replacing one actors face with another, retaining ALL facial expression, was downright scary. And the Spiderman gag footage, his spidey-suit oddly replaced with a fully reflective silver surface, like most of the rest of SIGGRAPH'S less entertaining presentations, were surely an indication of things to come.
Take the time to go to SIGGRAPH2002 [siggraph.org] and look around. If you find something interesting, write the author. This is where the new VR and AR comes from - not ATI!
INSTANT GRATIFICATION URL: Virtual Chanbara (Score:2)
Click on the video stream towards the top of the page for audio visual enjoyment (which includes the virtual sword fighting and much more). I *so* wish I was there.
A very Quick Summary [siggraph.org] of the Virtual Chanbara is also available. Trust me. The video does a much better job.
Then again there is the old way. (Score:2)
Charles Puffer
know in the SCA as
Lord Duncan Forbes Squire to his Grace Brion Tarragon
Tried It (Score:2, Interesting)
As far as the graphics are concerned, we're back to VirtaFighter 1. If high poly high texture models are your thing, this wont interest you. But,the graphics didn't worry me as much as the animation. I counted about 5 different cycles of animation from the enemy, which include predicable routines of slicing vertically, horizontly, the spinning cyclone of um, death, and the backward leap. Your enemy is no samuri. :)
I also found it intesting that everyone who played won. It was that easy. I long for realistic, fun vr experiences, but this was hardly much of a step forward.
Re:You can.. (Score:2)
I think bruises would be the least of one's concerns in swordfighting...
Re:You can.. (Score:3, Interesting)
Not really. The science of armor advanced to the point where it was quite equal to the sword, and an opponent has to work pretty darn hard to actually hurt someone wearing it.
I understand the SCA has quite a good safety record, considering they have guys in armor swinging swords at each other as a recreational activity.
Oh, and then there are *training swords* that don't have the sharp edges. And boffers. (toy "swords" made from some things easily obtainable at a hardware shop, that are far less effective than a fist when it comes to hurting someone.)
Re:damn cool (Score:2)
The Telstar Ranger [classicgaming.com] wasn't exactly Quake.