For the record, I want to say that on January 11, 2008, at 3:22 AM, clutching my twenty-sided die, I invented it--a walkable metaverse.
If you've read even this far you've probably been fantasizing about the holodeck ever since your pasty flesh and velvet cloak first consigned your little peter to a decade of singlehanded abuse. Well, now you can have it. The technology, at least, exists. And soon God (Johnny Lee) is going to make it for you. 
We'll just have to ask nicely. I'm going to start by writing him a letter asking him to be my new dad. Admittedly they'll have to steal Seadragon from MicroSoft, but whoever makes it--and it will be made--is in for a Brave New World.
Ok, I'm sure someone else thought of this first, and I want to know who. But when watching Ted's post about Johnny Lee's incredible 'Wii-Mote' head-tracking project--which basically turns your living room into Castle Wolfenstein--my head, as warned, exploded. His post, specifically the embedded video, is essential viewing for this piece. So go watch it here.
So, for my day job I've been surfing a million blogs, and I recently stumbled across this at Futurismic:
Yep. 'Teleglasses.' Not a joke. Really work. Wearable monitors. These are walkable metaverse component 2. Something clicked when I thought of these in the context of the head-tracking system. The gerbil on the wheel in my head maybe found some Ritalin rattling around in there.
But when I remembered this--component 3--and thought of it all together, my head really exploded. This component is worth several of its own posts. You might need a towel to bite on. I'll wait here. This is beyond even Johnny Lee for friggin brain-melting sweetness. There is a cleaner version here, but following is the embedded youtube copy. It's Blaise Aguera y Arcas demonstrating his zoomable system of visual representation and 3D modeling, Seadragon. It's the next paradigm of user interface. Simply by sending a bot to the web that recognizes and compiles various images of the same object or landmark from different angles, it assembles infinitely-zoomable and flawlessly smooth-zooming, perfectly-scaled, photo-realistic, three-dimensional models. Seriously, did you get a towel?:
The Synthesis:
So, first you'd tweak Lee's Wii head-tracking system (It is possible to use multiple Wii remotes to better calibrate location). Then, you'd pipe Seadragon images into the teleglasses and calibrate them to zoom and revolve counter to head-movement. Then, just by just walking around within the infra red grid, say, inside an empty warehouse, you could walk through the entire Sistine Chapel instead. Literally, with the very stone right up on your face, and passing out your field of vision at the corners of your eyes. But where Lee reverses the usual Wii component setup, leaving the Wii remote (which is essentially an infrared camera) at the screen, and putting the infrared light-sources on his head, we'd leave it how it is. Except, instead of standing in front of the screen, we'd be walking around with the screen right in front of our eyes and the remote/camera on our heads. This would allow us to pass through infinitely dense--that is perpetually zooming--gigabytes of visual data. (This is another of many amazing things about Seadragon. Quoth Microsoft: "Speed of navigation is independent of the size or number of objects." And also: "Performance depends only on the ratio of bandwidth to pixels on the screen.")
Of course, where space constrains the tracking of physical forward motion, there are numerous simple ways of artificially activating forward motion. So you're still good for your mom's basement. The only thing left is to calibrate angle of head. It'd be crudely doable with infrared lights on your glasses or helmet at x, y, and z axes. But I'm sure there is a better way; I'm just limited to the technical expertise of . . . the gerbil in my skull.
Any engineers/hardware folks want to clue me in?
However you did it, when you turned your head the image would shift correspondingly. And when you looked up you would see this:
If anyone wants to puncture my pipe dream, please do. But it all seems very simple.
More info here.
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