Shopping

Visited Urban Ore looking for any equipment possibilities. Found an octagonal poker table--a little beaten up but workable for our TUI table. It was a little pricey though so we decided to do a little bargain hunting online only to find that it was already a bargain at $85. It fit within our budget, its design fit our needs, and it fit into the back of my truck. We made plans to go back and pick it up the next day.

We also visited Al Lasher's looking for LEDs (for lighting the inside of our cubes) and possibly micro video cameras. We left a little disappointed since they had nothing in stock that we needed nor did they know if they would have anything in soon. Next we visited Mike Quinn's. We were also disappointed here since they're closed on Mondays. A side trek to a Radio Shack revealed that they didn't have the kinds of LEDs that we'd probably need.

To get even more detailed specs for our cameras and LEDs, Stephen dusted off his high school trig and figured out the optimal FOV (field of view) requirements for the cameras and LEDs. Turns out that our initial webcam purchase has too narrow an FOV to be used under the TUI table. To get the full table within the field of view, the camera would have to be mounted on the floor and the table would have to be 4.5 feet tall!!! The under table camera will need to have an FOV of between 71-81 degrees for a table just under 4 feet in diameter and 30" tall. To get a good "magic window" effect for our AR Viewer optimized for virtual objects and markers approximately 1-2 feet in front of the viewer, an FOV of around 56 degrees will be required. Our LEDs within the small little cube will need to be really, really bright to pass illumination through markers printed on paper and have an extra wide viewing angle of between 90 and 100 degrees.