Treeleaf, Zazen + the Hololens

[Jundo]

Maybe we won't have to wait ten years after all. Read this post about the (very cheap and lightweight) Google Cardboard VR goggles:

Yes, very cool and surprisingly simple ...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e32gj08GJbw

reminds me of a moving version of these (if any of you kids remember from way back when ... and yes, I think that is Jodi Foster) ...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9raLzDSTqtA

Some of the headsets seem quite streamlined ...



Not sure about sitting Zazen with you phone strapped to your nose, but we are on a good course!

Gassho, J

SatToday

[Sekishi]

I just... wow...

Ok, so I built the Google VR Headset from two old Amazon boxes, put in some lenses from an old telescope, spent the day making a fully panoramic 4K scan of my sitting space, got the apps loaded, the internet connection upgraded to 24mbps, and am ready to join you all in a radically connected consensual hallucination that projects a beautiful HD bump-mapped phong-highlighted render of my white-painted sheet-rock wall directly into our delicate retinas in all its tri-chromatic goodness.

Form is emptiness indeed!

Ok, I'll just let myself out, and take RU Serious and Queen Mu with me.

Gassho,
Sekishi
#sattoday (in "meatspace")

[Jundo]

I just... wow...

Ok, so I built the Google VR Headset from two old Amazon boxes, put in some lenses from an old telescope, spent the day making a fully panoramic 4K scan of my sitting space, got the apps loaded, the internet connection upgraded to 24mbps, and am ready to join you all in a radically connected consensual hallucination that projects a beautiful HD bump-mapped phong-highlighted render of my white-painted sheet-rock wall directly into our delicate retinas in all its tri-chromatic goodness.

Form is emptiness indeed!

Ok, I'll just let myself out, and take RU Serious and Queen Mu with me.

Gassho,
Sekishi
#sattoday (in "meatspace")

No, seriously ... how was it?

Gassho, J

SatToday

[Jundo]

CNET gave a good review ...

When Google announced a do-it-yourself virtual reality kit made of cardboard at its I/O developer conference this week, one of the first questions people asked was: Is this a big joke? ... Turns out, Google is using cheap, corrugated paper to give virtual reality its neatest and most accessible tool for converting nonbelievers. While it's no Oculus Rift headset, Google's Cardboard initiative has a huge role to play in VR by putting it in the hands of anyone with $25 and a smartphone.

VR is supposed to change everything: film, gaming, communication, travel, education -- even what we understand about sensory experience itself. ...

Announced as part of Google's annual product giveaway at I/O, Cardboard is a meant to be a super-low-cost, crowdsourced toolkit anyone can build to run elementary VR experiences. Essentially, it's a cardboard housing for a smartphone running Google's Android mobile OS. You get a $10 lens kit, about $7 in off-the-shelf magnets, $3 worth of velcro, a rubber band, and an easily programmable $1.50 Near-Field Communication sticker tag for launching the companion mobile app automatically. ...

The result is a low-key yet completely usable headset that's good enough to hand to a stranger and have them experience a genuine VR revelation. In fact, countless people -- at San Francisco's Moscone Center and here, too, at CNET's headquarters -- who have never had the opportunity to try on a Rift have been holding up Cardboard's goofy-looking smartphone mount and walking away thinking VR might not be so crazy after all.

They also say it may just be the coolest tech they've played with in a while.

Google's Cardboard app, which is what plays on the phone screen while it sits in the cardboard casing, lets you cruise through a landscape or city street in Google Earth and watch YouTube videos in a virtual theater. Even wackier Web-based experiences -- what Google is calling Chrome Experiments -- let you play a simple coin-collecting game, visit the Great Barrier Reef in a helicopter, and ride a roller coaster. That only one of the more than a dozen apps you can access with Cardboard is game-related is a boon for VR too, proving that you can design worthwhile and interesting experiences in a first-person view.

"Developing for VR still requires expensive, specialized hardware," Google writes on its dedicated Cardboard developers page. "Thinking about how to make VR accessible to more people, a group of VR enthusiasts at Google experimented with using a smartphone to drive VR experiences."

"By making it easy and inexpensive to experiment with VR, we hope to encourage developers to build the next generation of immersive digital experiences and make them available to everyone," Google concludes.

http://www.cnet.com/news/googles-cardboard-vr-headset-is-no-joke-its-great-for-the-oculus-rift/

Gassho, J

SatToday

[Sekishi]

No, seriously ... how was it?

I don't know. I was kidding with all the breathless tech talk.

However, I really DID order a pair from this outfit:

https://www.unofficialcardboard.com/

I will report back!

Gassho,
Sekishi
#sattoday

[Kyonin]

I am very interested in this.

VR in one of the many dreams we nerds been having for years.

It would be amazing if we could use this tech for Treeleaf.

Gassho,

Kyonin
#SatToday

[Chiko]

Ooooh yeah! Virtual reality to liberate all sentient beings! In truth, it can't be that far off...as long as no one disturbs my zazen by playing video games.

Gassho,
Matt
SatToday

[Jundo]

Hi,

For about $6US, my cardboard glasses arrived. I am sure that if you have a more sophisticated 3D system, it is nothing at all. However, I found the effects pretty impressive ... certainly enough to show what the future holds.

Unfortunately, my smart phone ... already 3 years old ... could not run many of the more sophisticated apps. However, even the ones I ran were pretty well done. The linking of the gyroscope function of the smart phone created a very responsive and realistic effect with motion.

What I predict that many of us will have fairly soon (if having the capital ... not to say there are not better things in the world for that capital) is a 3D immersion booth, closet or entire room that we will sit in (sit Zazen in?), and projectors and surfaces covered with diodes will give a true "holodeck" effect without glasses ... like below but more sophisticated ...

Anyway, certainly got my $6 worth! I recommend it to folks for a little amusement if you don't have much virtual reality experience, but do have a pretty recent smart phone.

Gassho, J

SatToday

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Zj1svgA8Cs

[Roland]

In the meantime there is some news about a secretive company, in which Google invested rather heavily, called Magic Leap. They work on a Dynamic Digitized Lightfield Signal™ (you can call it a Digital Lightfield™). It is biomimetic, meaning it respects how we function naturally as humans. It seems they project virtual objects on the physical reality (a bit like the HoloLens but differently). Anyway, they recently released this video (but you'll still need some special glasses):

https://youtu.be/kw0-JRa9n94

Gassho
Roland
#SatToday

[Kyonin]

Thank you Jundo!

If I can I'll give it a shot

Gassho,

Kyonin
#SatToday

[Jundo]

In the meantime there is some news about a secretive company, in which Google invested rather heavily, called Magic Leap. They work on a Dynamic Digitized Lightfield Signal™ (you can call it a Digital Lightfield™). It is biomimetic,

Yes, the lovely aspect of this combined "superimposed" technology is that we all all be sitting inside someone's home. You would be sitting in your space, and see the rest of us around you, just as if you had invited us in (and you wouldn't even need to make tea and sandwiches! )

On a darker note, for anyone who wants to see a series (every episode has different setting and actors) on the potential negative social and personal implications of modern technology set in the present or not too distant future, I cannot recomment this British series (really a mini-series) too highly. WOW. Almost makes me want to go back to the good old days before electricity. It is on Netflix.

BLACK MIRROR

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Mirror_(TV_series)

I am just hoping that there is no episode about an online Zen Sangha trapped inside a Hologram!

Gassho, Jundo

SatToday

[RichardH]

....I am just hoping that there is no episode about an online Zen Sangha trapped inside a Hologram! .....

Maybe we are... it brings to mind the Star Trek episode "Ship in a bottle"

Data and La Forge are enjoying a Sherlock Holmes holodeck program when the two notice that a character programmed to be left-handed was actually right-handed. They call Lt. Barclay to repair the holodeck, but as he checks the status of the Sherlock Holmes programs, he encounters an area of protected memory. He activates it to find the artificial sentient Professor James Moriarty (Daniel Davis) character projected into the Holodeck, who appears to have memory since his creation ("Elementary, Dear Data"), including during the period while he was inactive (a feat Picard claims to be impossible). Moriarty wishes to escape the artificial world of the holodeck and was assured by the crew of the Enterprise that they would endeavor to find a way to free him, and is irritated at the lack of results on the part of the crew and their seeming lack of even the tiniest bit of effort. Picard, along with Data and Barclay, attempts to assure Moriarty they are still working on that goal, but Moriarty is dismissive of that.

Moriarty confuses the crew by seemingly willing himself to existence by walking off the holodeck. He explains this to the stunned Picard and Data by saying, "I think, therefore I am.". Moriarty creates a companion for himself, the Countess Regina Bartholomew (Stephanie Beacham), commanding the computer of the Enterprise to place another sentient mind within a female character of the Sherlock Holmes novels. Moriarty then demands that a solution to get Regina off the holodeck be devised. He takes control of the Enterprise through the computer, insisting that a way be found for her to experience life beyond the confines of the holodeck.

While assisting LaForge, Data observes that LaForge's handedness is incorrect, just as they had experienced earlier. Data determines that he himself, Picard, and Barclay never left the holodeck, and everyone and everything that appears to be the Enterprise is part of a holodeck program Moriarty created. At that moment, Picard realizes that he has unwittingly provided Moriarty with the command codes for the Enterprise. With this information, Moriarty takes control of the real Enterprise from within his simulation.

Data finds a way to program the holodeck's simulation of a holodeck to convince Moriarty that he and Regina can be beamed into the real world, though in fact they are only "beamed" in the holodeck's simulation. Moriarty, satisfied with the ruse, releases control of the ship back to Picard. He and the Countess use a shuttlecraft given to them by Commander Riker to leave the Enterprise and explore the galaxy. Picard ends the simulation and returns to the real Enterprise. Barclay extracts the memory cube from the holodeck and sets it in an extended memory device in order to provide Moriarty and the Countess a lifetime of exploration and adventure.

Picard mentions the possibility that the crew's reality may actually be a fabrication generated by "a little device sitting on someone's table." This unnerves Barclay enough for him to test the nature of his own reality one more time: he gives an audible command to "end program" to test whether he is still in a simulation. There is no response

Gassho
Daizan

sat today

[Sekishi]

A cardboard v2.0 kit arrived yesterday. It took some hacks to make it work well (in particular I made some cuts and added rubberbands to hold phones in place better), but it works, and is pretty fun. The kit I ordered has adjustable-width eye pieces, which make a big difference for tuning the experience.

General thoughts:

- The motion tracking is better / more precise than I expected
- The lag is better than I expected, but still enough to induce queasiness after about 15 minutes of use
- The augmented reality (AR) apps are pretty amazing (where digital / rendered content is overlayed with video from the camera)
- It turns your phone into a hot-plate with a dead battery in a hurry!
- Android has more apps than iOS (by quite a bit)

Specific apps:

- The Google Earth app (Android) is AMAZING. I was able to fly down from space and eventually find our house, hovering about 100 feet above it.
- The Google Maps app (Android and iOS) is fun for exploring. I can sit the Zazenkai down the street from Treeleaf tonight!
- The roller coaster apps (Android and iOS) make me sick.
- There is a dinosaur app (iOS) that puts dinosaurs in the world around you (AR). Looking up into the sky and seeing pterodactyls is AWESOME!

Zazenkai:

- I am ready!

2015-10-23 14.27.37.jpg

- I'll be sitting down the street though...

2015-10-22 23.35.24-800w.jpg

The Google Maps app has the ability to use the phone in the camera to make a full 360deg panorama "bubble". We need one for the Zendo!

All in all, a really fun experiment. My son has already started porting two of his games to work with cardboard (as a result I don't get to use the headset much). One of them works really well with it now - the fact that he had the port working in less than 24 hours tells me that the developer tools are well thought out.

Gassho,
Sekishi
#sattoday in many different virtual places...

[Talib]

This reminds me of the Army. When everyone took a step back but that one person who was the voluntold.
Lol
Gassho
Sat today

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[Talib]

[QUOTE=Jundo;163692]Hi Roland,

There is no plan at all ... besides my saying "This is the future of Treeleaf Zazen". [emoji14]

And since you are the first person to respond, you are in charge of the project for now and making the plan. Congratulations!

Gassho, Jundo

SatToday


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