3rd generation omnidirectional treadmill

The omnidirectional treadmill (ODT) is a cool concept. Many connected belts rotate in one direction, then the whole set rotates in the perpendicular direction. This gives users the ability to walk in any direction. It was invented by Virtual Space Devices.

DISOLISS is my full time project. We are collaborating with the Army Research Laboratory's Human Research and Engineering Directorate (HRED) to develop a distributed simulation framework for dismounted soldier cognitive research, in CAVE-like environments with omnidirectional treadmills interconnected together. University of Louisiana at Lafayette is the first non-military institution to have an ODT! We officially inaugurated it during IEEE VR 2009, which we organized and hosted in March.

I have been in charge of developing the event management, collaborative session and physics modules. The immersive application is programmed with VRJuggler, using OpenSG as the renderer. It runs on a graphics cluster, so part of my responsibilities is doing the data synchronization. The system integrates the IEEE Distributed Interactive Simulation protocol. And Bullet is the physics engine.

News, articles

• Virtual Advantage: High-tech tools link university, military training centers. La Louisiane. Spring 2009.
  [ PDF | Article reproduced at ULtoday.com ]
• InFocus® DepthQ® HD 3D Projectors Utilized in VR Immersion Room at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. SIGGRAPH 2009 Exhibitor News & Press Kits. July 31, 2009.
  [ Read at virtualpressoffice.com ]

See more info about our project in CREATE's website.

(Sorry for the crappy pictures taken with my cellphone)

 

Open-DIS

Open-DIS is an open source implementation of the DIS protocol. Its nicest feature is the code generation of DIS Pdus from XML files, which avoids having to manually write the classes for each message. I needed to add the Live Entity family which was not originally implemented, and all I had to do was modify the XML describing the protocol.

I have contributed the implementation of C++ DIS Enumerations back to the open-DIS developers. Another thing I want to do (or pretty much *have* to for my project) is adding support for optional subfields, which are very common in the Live Entity family.