Projecting Data on a Sphere

necro81 writes "The NYTimes has an article in today's Science section that describes a four-projector system that displays images on a spherical screen. The Science on a Sphere system, developed at the Goddard Space Flight Center and used in some planetariums, can display and animate vast amounts of visual data from the Earth, Moon, Sun, and the other planets. The sphere is suspended by thin wires, and animating the image data gives the illusion of a free-floating, rotating world."

Comments

Seattle Sci-Fi Museum.

[9gezegen]

There are not one but two such displays at Seattle Sci-Fi Museum http://www.sfhomeworld.org/ One of them uses four projectors to project movie clips on a large sphere. I'm not sure about the second one since there are not projectors around (I suspect there is one inside) but it shows the surfaces of famous sci-fi planets. You can see this one at http://www.sfhomeworld.org/exhibits/brave_new_worl ds/index.asp

Re:Shouldn't they be able to do with 2 projectors?

[avalys]

Let's say you had two projectors, one pointing at the north pole and one at the south. The resolution would be terrible near the equator, because a very small part of the projected image would cover a large part of the globe surface.

In order for the resolution to be consistent over the entire globe, you have to either intentionally reduce the resolution of the projection near the poles, or add additional projectors.