VFX3D

July 2009

I recently got my hands on another VFX3D. What can I say, I love the helmet design. One thing to keep in mind if you’re hunting for one of these is that it is literally an older I-glasses VPC stuffed in the shell of a VFX1. I pulled out the displays and it’s the I-glasses, complete with the same power switch, volume control, and the stereo switch blocked off and relocated to the back of the helmet. Looks like IISVR just bought bulk I-glasses and mounted them in their shell. That was a bit disheartening after what I paid for this VFX3D, hahahaha. Especially because I just watched a pair of I-glasses VPC go for $30.00 on Ebay.

The VFX3D is just like the VFX1 with a linkbox. The optics are a bit higher in resolution but nothing too impressive. It’s very much the VR920 ancestor. I don’t know what quite else to say. It really is just the VFX1, or should I say the I-glasses, with a linkbox instead of the ISA card from the previous generation. The only problem I’ve had is that the video has a hard time syncing and recognizing the VGA input. That may very well be because it’s over 10 years old.

Now to the point of this page. The software for the VFX3D is from the Win98/Win2000 era. What I’ve done is write a very basic wrapper around the dll for the VFX3D which allows it to be used in WinXP and Vista 32-bit. I’m calling it VFX3DMouse. It reads the tracker, manipulates the data, and sends it to the OS as mouse input. Otherwise it merely allows you to access the individual functions of the dll through a simple MFC GUI window. It’s basically an extension of the VFXSample program in the VFX3D SDK. I’m posting this software for anyone to download for free in the spirit of this website. Hopefully this will breath a bit of excitement and fun back into the VFX3D for some people.

This is something I whipped up over the weekend and I’ll continue to polish it off when I have time. If you have any suggestions or see any problems please let me know. All you should need to do is plug your VFX3D into the VGA output of your computer and connect the serial port to a Serial-to-USB adaptor, or plain serial port if you still have one. Launch the program and enable the tracker. You can also set sensitivity and averaging if you want. Minimize the program and then run your game. That’s it! You should be off and running.

* Here is a zip file containing the EXE and the Visual Studio 2005 files.VFX3DMouse files Note: The EXE is in the Release folder.

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