[QLab] Surround Effects

[Christopher Ashworth]

On Jul 10, 2007, at 7:03 AM, Charlie Richmond wrote:
> A&G also have a
> variety of other spatialization products available which you can  
> explore on
> their web site.  We are currently evaluating several of them and  
> A&G are
> extremely helpful in communicating with any developer who wants to  
> support their
> products.

Thanks for the heads up!  Good to know about.

> I recommend looking carefully at The Bat since it very closely
> matches my opinion of a perfect input device (unless you can  
> actually track
> actors using RFID tags, but then that won't work if there's imaging  
> to do
> without something to track!)

On the question of how to track people I have some experience, as  
much of the work in my graduate program at UNC touched on this  
problem.  Greg Welch and his students have done some flat-out amazing  
work with a wide-area tracking device they have developed called the  
HiBall:

http://www.cs.unc.edu/~tracker/

Which is available commercially from 3rd Tech:

http://www.3rdtech.com/HiBall.htm

For many theatrical applications this device would be too  
conspicuous, but where it can be used its accuracy and robust  
performance is stunning.

There are also a number of mult-view geometry techniques that can be  
used to track people or objects using only a calibrated camera  
network--no hardware required on the subjects themselves.

Clearly, this is not something that would make its way into QLab in  
the short term, but when I switch to working on all this full time  
(which I now have a concrete plan to do), I may well be able to  
explore applying some of the more advanced junk I spent all that  
money learning.  ;)

-C