Darkwind Media Blog

Another recent project done in Luster was World of Soarcraft. No, I did not come up with the name. This came out of a partnership between Vuzix and the Rochester Institute of Technology. Our task was to come up with a demo incorporating Vuzix head-mounted displays and 3D game technology before the Imagine RIT Innovation + Creativity Festival happening on May 2nd. We had about one week. Naturally, I turned to Luster as our 3D platform. I wrote a plugin for interfacing with the Vuzix display, connected a Wii remote for control and designed a simple 3D landscape to fly around in.

The system would be output both to a standard monitor and to the Vuzix display. This gave a more immersive feel to the demo. The best thing about the Vuzix displays are their built-in head tracking. Since they can track all 3 degrees of rotation they can be used to control what part of the 3D scene the user can see. As the user looks around, the scene changes to reflect the direction they are looking in the real world.

We aren’t yet sure if the project will continue into the summer. There is certainly a lot more than can be done with the system. Currently there is no gameplay. That would be an interesting component to add to the demo. Also, the flight is not terribly accurate (the physics of it) and so it would also be nice to make the flight mechanics a bit more realistic. As always, there will be updates when we know more.