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Comment by sjs382 | Hacker News Reader

Have you seen the virtual pinball tables that emulate depth by tracking your head? It's a great effect

I have not, that sounds pretty cool. That might make the machines more fun, or at least feel more realistic.

I think having something more or less like a rumble feature would do a lot too. Even if you just had a solenoid that thumps when hitting a bumper would make it feel a lot more realistic.

This illustrates the concept pretty well. https://youtu.be/DoSLmAaRJ80?si=Mt94YNzBtLZzPDmh

It sounds cool, but because you won't be getting different views from both eyes, I can imagine the brain is probably going to be fairly confused by it.

I remember back in 2008-ish Johnny Lee at CMU built a cool hack that tracked the user's head using a Wiimote as an infrared camera, and used it for this kind of effect.

https://youtu.be/Jd3-eiid-Uw?t=147

Turns out that head-tracking parallax is surprisingly effective even without stereo vision. I'd guess there's some component about the effect working best when your head motion is large relative to the distance between your eyes, and also best for objects far enough away from your eyes that you're not getting a lot of information from the stereo vision.

I don't know exactly where those thresholds are, but I wouldn't be surprised if a pinball machine is in a regime where it works well.

There are tons of working examples of head-tracked 3D, and in practice it's good enough to satisfy most viewers (as long as you can deal with the obvious limitation: only one viewer at a time)

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