The castAR Kickstarter is live!

[geneb]

1. "CAE style display" has been done. By myself and Wayne Ledzian. It CAN be done for home use, just not without running afoul of the active patent that Rockwell-Collins has on the technique we used. There's one other DIY one out there that's currently in the assembly stage. That one is 737 sized.

There's no reason to lock any axis OmniAtlas. That would just be limiting yourself. For example if I were to build a Cessna 172 cockpit, it sure would be nice to be able to hang my head out the window, or at least get close to the virtual window pane. With castAR and enough tracking targets, you can actually do that.

I suspect the latency on the castAR is nearly undetectable based on what I've learned. You figure that the heavy lifting of the actual tracking is done (currently) on an FPGA that lives on the castAR itself. (For the production version, it'll be a custom ASIC.) The on-board controller works out the position and send that as a 72 byte packet over USB to the host. I'm not sure what the frequency is, but for some reason a period of 6ms seems to stick in my head.

The tracking targets consist of five IR LEDs. Four arranged in a square, with the 5th offset diagonally towards the center from the lower left LED. The #5 LED does two things - it blinks in the code assigned to that target and tells the tracker which LED is the lower left one. They're going to be releasing the modulation scheme and specs for the tracking targets so we'll be able to build as many as we like. The #5 LED is controllable by a cheap, sub $1 micro-controller.

I did opt for the April developer version. My Visa card cries at night because of this.

My first efforts will be to integrate castAR support into FlightGear. Once that's done, I'll look at what needs to be done in order to do the same for FSX/P3D. I'd like to get it working with the IL2 games as well.

There's a new game coming called Dragons of Elanthia (http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/...ns-of-elanthia) that will have castAR support out of the box. When I saw this game (it's basically a dragon-borne air-combat game), I pictured a small cube made of RR material, with a saddle of some kind in the middle of it. I instantly went, "yup, gotta get me some of that!" and contributed to THAT KS as well. If you can, contribute to their KS as well. It looks like it'll be an awesome game.

g.

[OmniAtlas]

Perhaps since tracking targets are so low cost we will be able to buy them direct -- 1 tracker every 110 degrees?

[geneb]

As far as I know, Technical Illusions will be selling trackers by themselves. I know that I'm going to look into producing them in small batches for my own use and I can make extras.

If it were me, I'd put tracking targets every 90 degrees and wherever else it looks like they might come in handy.

g.

[OmniAtlas]

Where would you mount your trackers inside the cockpit?

The other question I have is -- how effective would CastAR be on a curve screen? All the demoed videos (even the flight simulator ones) were done with flat reflective material.

[geneb]

You can mount the trackers where ever you like, just as long as castAR can "see" them.

I suspect that castAR will perform the same as any other projector against a curved screen - it all depends on how deep the curve is.

g.

[OmniAtlas]

$900,000 stretch goal and you won't need the trackers! Gyroscope included!

[OmniAtlas]

Looks like the final stretch goal has been met. Here is an example they posted up with a cockpit with surround visuals (and all this for less then $200!)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4FhdqMpTgSk

[Sammy-E]

Nice! that is the idea why I went into this kickstart.

[geneb]

Ah, you beat me to it OmniAtlas!

g.

[birdyguy]

Has anyone installed castAR in thier cockpits yet?