Inexpensive Immersive Projection

[Dutchboy]

Low cost 180 degree visuals? Perhaps.
[media]http://youtube.com/watch?v=HMB8YVbyicE[/media]

From the recent Virtual Reality Conference ( VR 2008 in Reno, NV, USA, March 2008 ) comes a low cost projection project which could help this hobby realize greater than 180 degree visuals. I'm hoping it's not blurry or stretched, but the video looks promising.

A quote from the paper:

"Our goal is to build an immersive projection system that meets
these requirements: uses minimal, affordable hardware; takes advantage
of existing surfaces for display; requires minimal setup and
configuration; produces a large field of view, greater than 180 degrees;
requires only a casual arrangement of system components;

avoids determining display surface geometry; supports real-time interaction."

A bio of one of the authors, and a link to the project paper in PDF.
http://www.mcs.csuhayward.edu/~tebo/bio.html
http://www.mcs.csuhayward.edu/~tebo/papers/yuen.pdf

They use a library called OpenCV (open computer vision library) for corner detection which helps to automatically calibrate the display. http://sourceforge.net/projects/opencvlibrary/

Looks promising. I'll have to tinker with this library.

Dutchboy

[AndyT]

That is a very interesting little bit of info.
I wonder what this puppy costs.

[Dutchboy]

If you read the paper, they say the total cost minus the projector and computer was around $350. Of course, I would want a seamless half dome screen which would be difficult to make.

Dutchboy

That is a very interesting little bit of info.
I wonder what this puppy costs.

[luisgordo]

Looks promising.