hm you should work on the transformation you use to map it on the sphere ... if im not mistaken if you do it correctly things shouldnt strech to the sides
I sure hope the system you're working on will not give the impression of hovering 10 feet above the track looking through a bubble of five inches of fibreglass.
that's what happens when you project a flat object onto a shaped screen. imo the projection has to be "domed" too. this will give you the desired look you are after. still looks cool tho
The effect is spoiled by the fact that the camera taking the vid is mounted considerably higher than the projector, which messes with the perspective. It'll look a lot better from the driver's point of view.
The 3D engine is rendering for a flat screen. It can't look right until the FOV is drawn for such a display (the same reason why you shoudn't angle in the sidescreens with a triple monitor setup - useful for 2D but screws up 3D completely).
The spherical distortion is currently being worked on, we already use this technology for flight sim's. We have a free API which allows for undistorted images. Once again this is just a mockup for trials.
The effect is actually a lot better when sat in the drivers seat than on the video as i am sat inside a dome screeen.
The projector has a special omnifocus lens which evenly distrubtes the pixels around the screen 180deg H and 135 deg V. This current projector is only working at 1024x7678 but coming soon are hopefulyl our HD projectors with same lens technology.
and therein lies the problem
that way you have streched sides which should not be streched
what you would need to do is compress the picture to the sides to get the correct aspect ratio on all points of the screen
Forgive my geometric ignorance - Just to verify, I assume this is because video cards render the image to a flat 2D display i.e., the virtual camera is not equidistant from all points on the display?
edit: sorry I see Bob already pretty much said the same thing. :hide:
what needs doing is 4 views are actually shot from virtual camera's and then rendered as 1 channel to output to the projector. this pre-distortes the image allowing 180x135 FOV distortion free. i will try and dig out some screenshots of our flight sim app with distortion correction applied.
It is quite amazing when workign 100% to get this effect from a single channel. It makes the game play much more immersive as you can see cars pulling up alongside when tring to outbrake you!
i have another youtube vid uploading now which may show more.
Interesting, must keep eye on this technology, some day might get one as that will give lot of immersion when it is working properly.
Triple head and 3 projectors is ghetto way to do such immersion, of course front and sides only and only with straight surfaces. Ok, can we talk from ghetto solution when you need 3 projectors and triple head?
well yes that would be another way of doing it
but i suspect via dx dlls that postprocess the image you might be able to get the correct mapping even from a flat projection rendering
i was thinking more in terms of 6 projectors 2 th2gos and polarization filters
A flat rendering will never be perfect as the image needs to be distorted to get proper 180d FOV, but this is very close when there in real life.
you have to understand that the video shot with a fisheye is still viewed on a flat screen so still distorted when viewed.
here is a couple of screen shots with image distortion turned on, these are perfect when viewed on our dome for flight sims
the images are upside down as we turn the projector back to front for flight sim to get the view on the 'top' of the dome.
The problem with more than one projector if you have never set them up is edge blending, colour matching and general positioning and most of all cost. there are more lamps to replace and have to fixed extremely acuratly.
thanks for the comments though
please see above, this is only a concept so far with regards to driving sims. but as stated above we already implement this software for flight sims and also other military applications.
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