
Virtual Forest - habi
http://virtualforest.io/faq.html
======
leblancfg
Great stuff! I'm a little frazzled by the fact that you're leaving 350$
cameras in the woods unattended, though. Figures they're not too far from your
home given the CAT5 length you mention, but for anyone interested in building
one in a more remote location (IoT SIMs with decent data plans are a thing
now!), you might want to consider camouflage, and/or setting up in a tree.

~~~
deanclatworthy
You'd be surprised how much untouched wilderness there is out there. And
generally opportunistic criminals don't tend to be wandering through the
wilderness looking for cameras to steal. And even then they're face will be
recorded for all they know.

~~~
trendia
Yeah. There are many trails in the US where you can hike for days without
seeing another human.

~~~
ci5er
Maybe if you go in circles. If you cover 20 miles/day, even in places like
Alberta or Wyoming, it's hard to go much more than two days without bumping
into another one in one form or fashion.

~~~
macNchz
On the trails, sure, but a short way off of even the busiest trails you could
go an extremely long time without seeing anyone, especially in areas that
don't allow hunting.

For example, this woman died after weeks spent lost just near the Appalachian
Trail: [https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2016/05/25/hiker-who-
died-...](https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2016/05/25/hiker-who-died-after-
disappearing-from-appalachian-trail-survived-for-
weeks/KAcHuKSdYVHNTNu0qQobvK/story.html)

~~~
ci5er
Yeah - we used to have a few of those unfortunate events reported every year
when I was growing up in Wyoming. Sometimes even when it wasn't cold
(dehydration is a thing, apparently). As young kids, we didn't know anything
about anything, and always wondered, "why didn't they walk in a straight line?
they were never more than 75 miles away from help."

~~~
zem
75 miles is a lot to cover on foot, too!

~~~
ci5er
It is! Almost two days on open range! (Which is why dehydration is such an
issue)

When I was a kid, we were amazed at the people who apparently got lost on
Hell's Half Acre, about 40 miles west of Casper:

    
    
      - https://www.google.com/search?q=hells+half+acre+wyoming&num=20&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwi2iqHTsOXPAhWCsFQKHegtCo0Q_AUICCgB&biw=1151&bih=818
    

Broke an ankle or got stuck in a gully - sure, but lost?

Now that I'm officially old, and far less energetic, I'd be willing to believe
that they just sat down and hoped that help would find them in time.

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spyder
It looks like it's just a single 360 camera with one viewpoint so it isn't
really a "true immersive experience" on VR headsets, it's just a 2D image
projected on a sphere. For true immersion in VR you need stereoscopic 360
degree recording, which can be achieved with using two of the 360 cameras or
with this mount for GoPros:

[http://izugar.com/product/z6x3d.html](http://izugar.com/product/z6x3d.html)

~~~
Joeboy
Surely if you have two 360° cameras, one of them will be capturing the other
one. I would think you'd need one 360° camera rig with stereo pairs of
cameras.

~~~
throw_away
With just two cameras, not only would you capture the other camera in view,
but in those co-linear directions I don't believe it would be possible to get
any depth information (or it would be all weird, like the same view, but
magnified in one eye).

~~~
roywiggins
See: Lytro, which has struggled to find a good use for its lightfield cameras,
but might actually have something now. Lightfield cameras can extract depth
information directly, which lets them synthesize stereo views with a single
camera.

Duct-tape enough of them together and you can synthesize stereo views in every
direction, which is pretty cool.

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plaguuuuuu
Pitch black. Not sure if nighttime, or not working correctly :P

~~~
spartanatreyu
Looks like something is working, the browser is receiving an image and it's
not a solid black colour, turning up the contrast to the max you can see some
difference:

[http://i.imgur.com/Tm6J5iI.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/Tm6J5iI.jpg)

I'm not sure if it's just image compression artefacts or that's what the
camera is actually seeing before it's processed and sent to users.

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neogodless
Does anyone else find it weird that you click and drag in the opposite
direction you (well I) would expect, considering that the cursor becomes a
hand that grabs?

~~~
mikeflynn
Yes. I came here to say this.

~~~
ngokevin
Filed a PR.
[https://github.com/aframevr/aframe/pull/1987](https://github.com/aframevr/aframe/pull/1987)

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trezm
I don't have a cardboard to properly see if the image really is "3D", but it
seems like it's just a photosphere and therefore doesn't really have depth
information. Is that right?

~~~
trendia
That is correct.

Sometime in the future, consumers will have software that can turn 2D images
into simulated 3D [0]. It's still in dev mode right now, though.

[0]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oie1ZXWceqM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oie1ZXWceqM)

~~~
soylentcola
Yeah, and there are some other in-dev camera rigs that use multiple cameras
plus software interpolation to simulate 3d as well.

The thing that's most intriguing to me are the experiments using multiple
depth cameras set up around a space and using software to build a live, 3d
model and overlay the video data as a texture on top of the models. It's all
very rudimentary and low-res at the moment but it's the sort of thing that can
eventually become 3d/VR telepresence and that just strikes me as awesome.

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oliv__
Pretty cool. Make it live and add some sound and you could almost feel like
you're there.

Simple nitpick: when I drag to the left, I expect to go to the right. (I'm
just seeing this through my browser though, maybe it makes sense in VR, idk.)

~~~
moron4hire
There is no consensus on drag direction. I've built several projects and have
alternated the drag direction on each and have always received vociferous
complaints about both.

~~~
tedmiston
Or just make it a preference, like what Apple does with trackpad scrolling
direction.

~~~
moron4hire
Making it a preference means creating a settings UI. People have their
preference, but they are also adaptable. It's not immediately clear that a
"VR" experience (not that I'd call 360° photo "VR") would benefit from a
preferences UI.

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jsingleton
This is cool, it's a DIY 360 degree camera attached to a Raspberry Pi that you
can view with a VR headset.

This page is the build and parts list but the web VR using A-frame is at:
[http://virtualforest.io/vrforest.html](http://virtualforest.io/vrforest.html)

~~~
tantalor
Demo is just a static image... isn't this supposed to be a webcam or
something?

~~~
jsingleton
> Images stream live every 15 minutes from 4 - 22h in the EST (GMT-5) time
> zone

There is a large 360 YouTube timelapse video here:
[http://virtualforest.io/vrtimelapse.html](http://virtualforest.io/vrtimelapse.html)

If you want to do non-360 timelapse with the regular (and much cheaper) Pi
camera then I wrote a guide: [https://unop.uk/time-lapse-photography-with-a-
raspberry-pi](https://unop.uk/time-lapse-photography-with-a-raspberry-pi)

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ilaksh
On Chrome on Nexus 6 with Android 7 get black screen regardless of orientation
or screen touching/dragging.

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moron4hire
This is incorrect:

    
    
        On mobile devices the A-frame framework will use the device sensors to figure out it's relative position.
    

It will only figure out orientation, not position. Position is impossible to
integrate from the low-end IMUs used in smartphones.

------
silverlight
Doesn't seem to work for me on my HTC Vive but I've never used any A-Frame
site before so I might just be doing it wrong. I tried on both Chrome and
Firefox.

~~~
moron4hire
For starters, you need an experimental build of Chromium that Google provides
in a ZIP file, or you need Firefox Nightly, and in both cases you have to
enable a flag.

After that, I do not know what the current status is for A-Frame supporting
the Vive. And of course, there was recently a big change to the WebVR API, so
A-Frame may not be caught up to that, either.

As far as I know, A-Frame's "known good configuration" is Oculus Rift +
Firefox Nightly, or (HTC Vive|Oculus Rift) + not-latest Experimental Chromium.

And Windows 10, of course, because Facebook can't find a single person capable
of doing graphics work on Linux out of 15,000 employees, or so they would have
us believe.

You can find access to all of these things at
[http://www.webvr.info](http://www.webvr.info)

~~~
cbhl
> because Facebook can't find a single person capable of doing graphics work
> on Linux out of 15,000 employees

Either you muck around with NVidia binary Linux drivers (or worse, binary
drivers for some ARM chipset in an Android phone), or you're working with
Intel stuff (which isn't going to give you a cutting-edge VR experience).

A for-profit corporation has better things to spend its 20% time on.

------
3ds
The A-Frame framework that is mentioned can be found here:
[https://aframe.io/](https://aframe.io/)

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0xdeadbeefbabe
What's the UBEC for?

Edit: does it just convert the 24v to 5v, and why is that better than just
doing 5v to begin with? Is this so you can get more current?

~~~
m_eiman
If the power supply is far away it's better to have a higher voltage due to
voltage drop due to cable resistance, 24V is pretty standard AFAIK.

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dbrgn
Really cool! I'll have to test this with Cardboard.

The VR view seems to crash Firefox on Android 5 / 6 on two devices I tested
though.

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0xdeadbeefbabe
This is really cool, and I'm not complaining or feature creeping at all, but
what about the sound of the forrest?

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DanBC
There doesn't seem to be anything to control condensation.

Do you think this might become a problem?

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tantalor
Doesn't seem to work well with custom orientation in Chrome devtools:
[http://i.imgur.com/fp2kSO8.png](http://i.imgur.com/fp2kSO8.png)

~~~
ngokevin
I recommend [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/webvr-api-
emulatio...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/webvr-api-
emulation/gbdnpaebafagioggnhkacnaaahpiefil?hl=en)

