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Projecting Video On Curved Surfaces
Jochen Bedersdorfer writes "According to golem.de, a research project in the area of Augmented Reality created a technology to
project videos onto arbitrary existing screen surfaces, like wallpapered walls or window curtains. ... Quite awesome. Now I can use this ugly corner in my living room effectively."
being able to project porn onto boobs! The possibilities are limitless
With the rapid expansion of relatively high-end (5|6|7).1 surround sound stereo equipment in homes that is beginning to be joined by HDTV, could a technology like this bring a new option to table? Could we have something like omnimax theatres in our homes?
You have an ugly corner in your living room, and you're going to "improve" it by projecting some arbitrary image onto it?
Try paintings. Or a ficus.
Just another way to making visual media more exciting to enjoy. Now all we need is for the people producing the media to make something worth watching.
The problem with projecting an image onto a non-flat surface is you can only get it to look proper from one small area. Anywhere else and it's still distorted.
Karma: Negative (Mostly affected by dorm trolling)
Good one guys, you just slashdotted Germany.
It's a Bagel.
But what if your home already is creepy, dark, and with strange noises from the corners?
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
:-(
blakespot
-- Heisenberg may have slept here.
iPod Hacks.com
Nonslashdotted link (in German, though)
Before televisions became the norm, projectors were a common sight around middle-class homes. I remember my father used to show us home movies, Disney cartoons, and science documentaries on a compact Super 8mm projector on idle evenings.
I don't remember the size or even the presence of the "canvas screen" being a big issue. A blank wall did just fine (without any significant loss of picture quality IMHO). If a smaller/larger image was desired, the projector was just moved nearer/away from the wall as necessary. Not such a big deal. Ofcourse the room had to be pitch dark because of the low contrast produced by the projector.
IMHO, this is a solution looking for a problem. I agree the ability to project on curved surfaces might be a bonus, but the pictures did not reveal any significant advantage.
I was more impressed by the "light insensitive" projector that was on /. a few weeks back - it could display images/video effectively in bright light - can't find the link.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
That's true. The projected image will only look correct from a single user location (the "sweet spot.") One way around this would be to use a tracking device and recalibrate the projection warping when the user location changes. Still, that would only work correctly for a single viewer.
Letter
I'd be interested in reading something about typical request rates under a Slashdotting, whether most sites get bottlenecked at the router or ISP, and what the bottlenecks are in the webserver, disk access, or database connectivity or lookups.
Maybe such info already exists somewhere?
Funny, I was just thinking about projecting video onto clouds the other day. You probably couldn't cut code using clouds as your gigant display unit, but you could probably watch some 'herbal movies' on them...
Simpy
... at Siggraph 2003.
There was one demonstration showing projection onto the inside of a translucent sphere, while in the paper "iLamps: Geometrically Aware and self-configuring projectors" Raskar et al showed a system that could also combine the output of several projectors. It was quite impressive.
The projector (both in stills and on the avaliable film) compensates for both surface color and configuration automatically and applies the transformation on a pixel-by-pixel basis. Good idea, IMHO. Sure seems to work. Seems to be arbitrarily flexible, to first order.
There are definitely artifacts, but they seem to follow curved edges - not surprising when one realizes that pixels are finite and rectangular.
I wonder how the reflectivity of the surface affects the adaptation.
Watch the movie - it's pretty clear on the process.
At most cricket grounds over here (esp. for internationals like the current Windies tour) sponsor's logos are printed on the pitch (painted on the grass). BUT. The best camera angles for cricket are from a high up camera inthe stands. So the sponsors have to predistort their logos so that it looks good in a long, panoramic, high shot.
I thought that it was quite clever when I first saw it.
Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.
I haven't RTFA (/.'ed) A norwegian company who specialices in exhibition designs use a procedure to project images on walls in smal spaces, or curved surfaces. They build the room or sphere in a 3d program, and maps the wall with the images they will project. Then place the camera where the projector will be placed, and render. Now you have a video you can project that will fit the wall precicely.
When i Moderate something -1 Flamebait, why do i not get another modpoint?
5--1 = 6
So does this mean I can project video onto my girlfriend to make her look like Keira Knightley? :)
oh, and don't worry, I'm just kidding about having a girlfriend...
If you go here and scroll down halfway to "Sleeping Beauty Castle gets a new look", you can see a couple tests that Disneyland did to "paint" the castle. One painting it gold with a ribbon around it, and another one turning it into a US flag.
http://www.siliconoptix.com/products/index.shtml
I work at a planetarium and we researched this product as a means to project video onto our dome theater. It can do any number of near-realtime distortions to the video, including hemispherical mapping, or you can use included software to create custom mappings (like corners).
We concluded that this product was perhaps one generation early but looked promising. Hopefully they sold enough of them to stay afloat and work on v2.0...
I realize that this only covers the 'geometry' portion and not the 'color' one, but to me it seems like the harder half to tackle. Maybe I don't have enough knowlege of the subject, but given the input from the camera, enough time and filters, solving the color problem seems doable too.
In our church, we are having issues mounting a projector in a place that is inconspicuous. Most of the inconspicuous places introduce too much of a keystone effect. That means that we will have to fix a (very expensive) projector to project with a special lens to one and only one screen. It might work fine when there is a large group, but if a smaller group wanted to use it in a more intimate setting, everyone will be sitting up front craning their necks. It would be neat if we could just point the projector at any surface and have it automatically correct for whatever distortion happened to be there.
ayershome.org/users/eric
"...until I discovered the Slashdot workout plan! Sure, I still spend 8 hours a day in a dim server room and all my cardio comes from playing Counter Strike, but with this new Slashdot brand portable non-optimal surface video projection system I now have a full-body projection of vintage Arnold Schwarzenegger on me at all times! Okay, so he's a lot taller than me and that puts his weiner in the middle of my chest, but that *still* gets me more chicks than before! Thanks, Slashdot!"
"Now I can use this ugly corner in my living room effectively"
Sorry to disappoint you mate, i dont think your mirror is going to be any more effective than it already is.
because they have been projecting high definition film onto curved surfaces since the 80's
but re-inventing wheels seems to be fashionable thesedays so maybe it will work
This is so much looking to be used as a "road runner" practical joke. Leave one of these projecting an "open door" and a "hallway" onto a solid brick wall. For the truly evil, project a "tunnel" complete with "diversion sign" onto the ground beside a road, at a sharp bend...
From the article: Such devices might make it possible to convert your bookshelf into a TV screen, or your kid's closet into an interactive virtual playground.
Of course if your kid was bad, you could also turn his closet into a freakish nightmare...
Ok, maybe you it to your house mate just to watch him go screaming out into the night.
You guys get a good look at "The Extended Virtual Table" on that page? Pretty Interesting.
So the sponsors have to predistort their logos so that it looks good in a long, panoramic, high shot.
I thought that it was quite clever when I first saw it.
So did I. At Taj Mahal. There are some passages from the quran around some of the archways. The size of the lettering increases towards the top of the arches to compensate for the perspective.
Sure it won't replace regular screen in places where there is room for them, cinema, meeting room, entertainment room, but it seems perfect for holding a demonstration and not having to take a screen with you and for information/commercial displays.
Eeek more commercials. Bad germans.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
You could project porn of porn getting projected on boobs onto boobs!
Hints for geeks: the only place she wants you to look is in her eyes- When they can project p0rn retina-to-retina- this will be a major advance. I shudder to think what women (geeky variety or otherwise) might want to watch on a such a device: Shopping channel maybe? (ducks!)
looks like the same technology of a camouflage that makes objects appear translucent by projecting a background over it.
I own an LCD RPTV (Sony GW III), and IMHO lamping is still a big problem for projectors, even rear projection systems.
My TV is pretty good in ambient light, but not great -- I still find myself closing the drapes closest to the TV for daytime watching. You can always jack up the lumens with brighter lights, but this leads to heat problems and lamp replacement costs. I'm already scared for the replacement bulb price for my TV, which is only good for 3 years -- supposedly its a couple of hundred dollars.
Actual projectors are pretty worthless in any real ambient light in my experience; you need semi-darkness as best.
And it's not just ambient light, it's image quality. Projection systems usually have pretty crappy black levels. I can live with mine since I'm not that much of an image zealot (no ISF calibration, etc). But you also have uniformity issues, focus, etc.
The way I project video on a curved surface is to point the projector at the curved surface.
I am looking forward to holographic projectors being available. You don't need a screen, you can see 3-D, and combined with the idea of a "touch-projection" technology (think "touch-screen"), we would be onto something like a Holodeck. Doom9 would be extremely cool.
If you have a handy pair of boobs to project onto, why do you need this? Isn't that the point (or at least, a pair of points)?
(Yes...yes...insert the obligatory 1024x768x38DD reference here.)
I have been dreaming of a VR headset that contains a curved screen. If such a technology could be made small enough could be the enabler for turning these virtually not reality headsets to real VR headsets.
mmmmm....
"The Extended Virtual Table"
Yeah right...
Did anyone else notice the color correction that was going on in those pictures as well? It shaped the color redistribution so the movie looked normal on a checkerboard curtain... not to mention accounting for the irregular shape of the surface. The combination of those two features is amazing. You have always been able to keystone, but if you have, say, a painting on the wall and don't want to take it down every time you watch a movie...
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
Curves? You must be talking about a different actress.
Seriously, I doubt a Keira Knightley projection will have problems making any woman appear to have the body of a teenage boy.
I was at SIGGRAPH yesterday, and there were a number of exhibits that used these technologies.
The internal projected sphere you mentioned was in the art gallery exhibit, and you could choose between a number of video/art projects (only one worth watching was a cool animation of plate tectonics).
A commercial exhibit had setup using like 5 or 6 projectors to produce one *big* panorama animation of a 3d fish tank (or undersea, not sure), and it looked flawless.
Your hybrid is not saving the environment. Its purpose is to make you feel good about buying something.
Can they create a display that shows a distorted image such that someone with 20/20 vision and no astigmatism would see it blurry but someone with 20/400 and an astigmatism would see it perfectly?
-- Each tock of the Planck clock is a new world and here we are still life. --
will be very very very disillusioned now ;)
OK, I think this is cool. But I have a pet peeve with people calling something like this "a technology." Isn't it really just an application of technology? Or a technique, or a method, or a system? Calling something a technology has become a cliche that immediately connotes--for me anyway--something that its overhyped. Like "an historical event" or "a software engineer." It's press release hyperbole.
Or am I just jaded?
This technique is a refinement of other systems that project on curved surfaces or correct alignment or create seamless panoramas using multiple projectors.
Funny... until flat screen televisions came out, 99.99% of all video was "projected" onto curved surfaces.
If I could I'll give you a "Pervert" modding for this special comment :)
Yahh, hiii haaaaa! -Major Kong, from Dr. Strangelove
If the calibration is in real-time then could it possibly work on a liquid like milk or colored/dyed water? I'm even more interested in how they make those holographic images on that site! Projecting onto a corner is interesting but you would have to be directing under the beam from the projector to get the right effect.
for a second that it said:
"Projecting VOODO on a curved surface."
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
I'm confused by the images. I see a brown "screen" in the form of a castle wall. But I see white light reflecting back. Likewise with the "Finding Nemo" fish. Isn't this a physical impossibility? As I remember my basic optics, all light is made up of Red, Green, and Blue. If an object reflects all three of these colors, then you see it as White. If it absorbs some of them, and reflects the rest, then you see other colors, like brown. So, if a brown wall absorbs the components that make up anti-brown - how can it ever reflect white?
as i recall my basic physics, light is made up of basic Red, Green, and Blue wavelengths. you combine them to make all other colors. an object that reflects all wavelengths looks white. to make an object look black, it reflects none of the colors. and to make brown (as in say, a castle wall) you reflect some combination of colors. in other words, objects absorb light to make it look some color - like brown. so, if a castle wall absorbs all but the brown wavelengths of RGB, how can you get White to reflect? I don't think you can. the best the castle wall can reflect is some combination of RGB that it does not absorb. To use an extreme example, imagine a plain black screen. it would not reflect any light and therefore the device would be useless if black were one of the colors you were displaying on using this projector. Less extreme, i think this projector could never do much better than display a sort of generalized brown image on the castle wall. Physics majors, shed some light on this?
will never look the same
Me and friend has been playing with the idea to project a car racing game onto the wall in a narrow room or a hallway. With some simple algebra you could calibrate the sidewall and corners so that the scenery on the left and the right of the car is projected on the side walls and the road on the wall in front of you. Such scenary will not requiry much resolution since you will not look at it directly, but it will definitely add to your perception. That should quite a simple add-on to existing games since you only have to reserv some of the margin for the sidewalls and the ceiling. Imagine when you see/get a feeling of your oponent next to you... To bad I can't afford a projector though :(
if they can modify the image to sooth the eye, why can this be use to blend an object to hide it in plain view? (i.e. take the surroundings and make and object dissappear like a camouflage?)
A research group at the University of Kentucky did this several years ago. They actually used arrays of projectors overlapping in 360 degrees. They would run a brief pattern test, which was recorded by digital video cameras. The program would then align all the projector images to overlap correctly and pre-destort the images so they would be in focus in corners or on various objects in the room. The other cool thing is that the overlapping could be done so that it would greatly reduce shadows if someone/something was partially blocking a projector.
These guys at http://obscuradigital.com/ have been doing this for quite a while now.
They were at E3 the other year.
The guys at obscura digital deserve credit for doing this first!
I work for a company that owns a projection screen manfacturer. We have built a number of odd shaped and curved screens. An image processor called " SCREENSHAPER", made by Folsom Research in California is used to map the video onto the surface. The Screenshaper can bend the video to fit in many directions at the same time. We use it quite often in the corporate show market and the tradeshow market
my professor at UNCW has been working on this http://people.uncw.edu/adharg/VR/vr.html (website isn't pretty). He can either take pre-made videos and display it on them, or he can use a video camera that runs through a hardware filter that he created that will turn the video feed into something that looks 3d on the curved screen. He uses SPI to convert the code into opengl that will appear to be curved correctly. The work is being done for future projects in Florida. The idea is to stream the video from undersea dives to the marine biology research lab in Wrightsville Beach, NC and displaying it on the surface. Eventually robots with cameras would be able to dive and the researchers and use remote controls to control movements of the robots. We got to use it some during my comp. graphics class. I posted some pics of it on my site at http://www.qsopht.com/school/index.htm
www.qsopht.com ~q
Using a Video Toaster, SVHS deck, goggles and a color Sony security camera. I'm glad someone's developing the idea further. My approach used chromakeying, making it quick and dirty and cheap, perfect for the home market.
Toward Ultimate Reality
I even worked it into a few joke articles on BeDoper:
All Future Movie Studios and Televisions To Run BeOS
404 Company Goes Pubic
Since 1991 or so, at least. Some people have "bubbles" in their vision, which NASA scientists corrected using augmented reality, by distorting the image to compensate for their eye defect.
I looked for a link, but my page came up first, and I didn't see any others.
(to me) this is just like using an EQ in a stereo. The idea behind the eq is to obtain an accurate playback of the original recording, where the eq fixes the "flaws" in your system and your environment.
In fact, there are audio systems where you take a microphone and it listens to test sounds and the eq can auto adjust. Similarly there are systems to calibrate home theater projectors autonomously.
This particular idea is like a natural extension. Good Job to Jun. Prof. Dr. Ing. Oliver Bimber.
That would not be slashdotted but Schmarrepunktiert or Schnittpunktiert.
http://www.laservideo.com/
Firefox &
Image Geometric/Signal Linearity Predistortion is used since DSPs like dsp56000 in early 80ties came in. Now this technology is widely used for angled projections for business graphs and stuff like that.
It's a matter of how good, precise and heavy you can calibrate it (not a piece of cake).
You can make such things wih photoshop/corel/your own soft, your 486sx pc and videoprojector.
And YES - it looks even worse when you watch the projection from angle (OR DISTANCE! - due to perspective distortions) different from which you calibrated it.
It seems this websites also projects the images over itself. The text is completely invisible to the reader, because of the perfect projection of the website's images!
We did all see the projections on the stylised face 'statue' during the opening ceremony of the 2004 Summer Olympics, didn't we?
There was also the projections onto the three linked loops later in the ceremony.
Looking at space, radio, science and computing from a 'down-under' amateur enthusiast perspective.