This virtual walkthrough was created during the infancy of the technology. In fact, IBM requested that we produce the images at a specific resolution to work with their new VR technology. While I did this I could also see flaws in their approach.
Enjoy the video, and tell me what you think. ~Nick Buccalo
This virtual walkthrough was created during the infancy of the technology. In fact, IBM requested that we produce the images at a specific resolution to work with their new VR technology. While I did this I could also see flaws in their approach.
IBM’s approach, developed to compete with Apple’s VR software, was to create a six sided cube, each holding an image created by a camera or in my case digitally created. There is a fundamental problem with this approach and that is the distance from the center of the viewer to the surface constantly changes, thus creating distortion at where the image planes intersect. Let me explain further… The distance to the center of each surface of the six sides is identical, but when one’s viewpoint moves away from the center of the image the distance increases. This leads to one conclusion, that the surface must be spherical so that the eye sees the surface at a constant distance, something that was covered in my 1983 study on Virtual Reality I did while at Harvard University. Still, there is the possibility of software compensating for this distortion so that the image appears to be not distorted.
This problem became very apparent to me during the execution of the VR images for their new corporate headquarters in Armonk, NY. That while the computer could generate non-distorted images of the spaces that when I inserted people that if they were located near the edges of the planes they would look skinny. I compensated for this through photoshop to make them look reasonable, but that only worked for the horizontal plane (at the horizon) for the problem also exists in the vertical plane, that the feet and head would also distort and thus my manipulation of added images had to compensate in a curved approach.
So in the end either the VR images look perfect while viewing them in the virtual world, or they look perfect while viewing them as single images, but not both. The same can be said for images projected on the inner surface of spherical globe.
To put into perspective these images were created in 1995. For those wondering, no one except our studio was able to combine lighting, reflections, context photos, textures and the rest into a digital image. We were the leaders in digital imagery and thus became the target of multiple hacks and robbery of our images, company name and other things. One hack left malware on our website making it non-functional. Those issues have all been resolved and we are fully protected including our name SimpleTwig™ which is trademarked. Any attempt to disrupt our service will be met by our lawyers.
The Drawing Studio is now called SimpleTwig Rendering, to usher in yet another couple of decades of wonderful digital technology and reflect our many branches, yet simple and direct results. ‘Every nest starts with a simple twig.‘