Long before the latest 3D craze that was spurred single-handedly by Avatar, there was a big virtual reality boom in the early to mid 1990’s. It was a prime time for virtual reality 1.0 because of movies like the lawnmower man and the availability of relatively cheap 3D-capable hardware. If you already had a 386DX/25, you could interface a Mattel Power Glove and a Segascope 3-D to it via parallel ports and run rend386, a MS-DOS based virtual reality environment. By that time, those items were outdated and showing up at thrift stores for next to nothing and rend386 came with several books, most notably Virtual Reality Creations
As of 1993, the Dave Stampe and Bernie Roehl decided to split up and perpetuate virtual reality research with separate tools. Dave Stampe apparently went on to write a tool called VR-386 which was essentially a 90% rewrite of rend386 and was exponentially better. Unfortunately, I can’t seem to find any more information on it than is mentioned here on the power glove page. Bernie on the other hand went on to create a tool called AVRIL. Then Bernie went on to work on VRML which was designed to be used in a web browser and subsequently worked on Java3D. Taking a quick look at some of the Java3D examples, I’m thinking that it’s not really quite as easily implemented as rend386 but I’ll reserve judgment for a later date when I have a chance to delve into some of these languages.
Reading the VRML wiki, it seems that VRML has been superseded by a language called X3D which is an XML based description language for virtual worlds which I plan to take a closer look at.
I am tentatively planning on building a USB power glove and/or Segascope interface out of an Atmel AVR at some point in the future. As we all know however, hardware useless without the accompanying drivers and software. Consequently, I’m still looking for the final environment in which I want to implement my interface. Maybe I’ll just grab a 486DX/66 and dig up one of those old copies of rend386 but I would far prefer something that I could use with Google Sketchup drawings so the search continues.
Here is a small contemporary house I drew in Sketchup
Here is the inside
Here is another inside view
Here is a view of the back
I’d love to walk through that house in 3D with my Segascope and power glove in hand someday…
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It is strange, but it seems like interest in VR is popping up again; I don’t know if it is all the 3D hype, but I don’t care – its nice to see again!
I played around with Rend386 and other packages waaay back in the day; I still have my modded powerglove (also have a pair of the sega glasses, but never modded them since I managed to get ahold of a Stuntmaster HMD in 1993).
The last I played with anything, I managed to get my modded powerglove working with a linux driver somebody else wrote – it wasn’t the greatest thing, but it worked. I too have been thinking about connecting the powerglove via an ATMega (kinda reproduce the old-school Menelli serial PG interface) – good luck with it, whatever you do.
I have found that for ease of use, Python with PyOpenGL works pretty good – there are tons of OpenGL demos and such out there (most written in C) – that could be converted to Python.
Though an old-school VR rig using an old box and some old hardware has some appeal to me…
BTW – just posted this on my website – you might enjoy: http://www.phoenixgarage.org/show_article/104
I’ve found a book Virtual Reality Creations in library. Although is was old, I found it interesting.
At that time I was busy with learning and experimenting with 3d and stereographic 3d (in c++ and DirectX)
I searched the Internet for more information about rend386. With the info I found I made a simple web page for Rend386: http://www.rend386.com/
Although my focus changed, my interest did not.
I used to have that book. Thanks for that page of yours. I’ll delve into it a bit more when I can get back to focusing on VR.
I enjoyed your post about REND386. Personally, I never used it when it was current technology because back then I did not have a PC, but when I discovered it in 2007 I immediately liked it: even though what it can do is risible today, I realized that in the 90s, VR enthusiasts would’ve found it absolutely mindblowing. I dedicated a page of my website to REND386 and to VRML reproductions of several REND386 virtual environments: http://devilmaster.altervista.org/rend386.html
Yes that is really amazing! I saw your work because you emailed me via my REND386 fan page 🙂
(By the way my webpage for REND386 is moved to http://www.thewiderweb.com/rend386/)