For the first project, I decided to jump straight in and developed a system for viewing life in the third person. Armed with an old virtual reality system and a childs toy video camera, I created a portable, fully self contained system in which the user can wander around, interacting with others in a over-the-shoulder environment.

For this project, I started off with an old virtual reality helmet we found while rummaging through old ACTlab stuff during office hours. After playing around with it for a while and running through multiple project ideas, one of my friends came up with the idea of bringing the camera system found in a video game into real life. So I began work on putting together an over the shoulder, 3rd person POV camera system that worked half decently and was totally portable. Using an old children's toy video camera brought in during class one day, I built a tiny camera enclosure to be held out behind me about 6.5 feet. The feed from the camera ran down into the backpack and was transmitted to the VR headset, to where I would be seeing myself in the third person as I walked around.

Unfortunately, the power requirements of the system are rather high, so it required a large lead acid battery and power inverter to run off of, so the backpack ended up being very heavy.

Below I have pictures of the building process.

I have video of a run we did through campus, once I figure out how to reduce it nicely to a reasonable size, it will be available on the site.

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