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Screen With 180 Degree Field of View
emj writes to tell us project jDome has started actively soliciting consumer feedback and, of course, donations. They are currently promising to deliver their "180 degree FOV monitor" this year for a pricepoint of around $200. The videos and talk have been circulating for the last couple of weeks or so, but they have added a video of the supposed tech in action. Buyer beware, but I would love to see a couple of reviewers get ahold of this and let us know what the story is.
How much more for the projector? won't come cheap no matter how you look at it.
You're not going to be able to see the whole screen without turning your head. Isn't the average human's field of view between 120-140 degrees?
I write sci-fi for metalheads
This looks interesting, but I'm not sure I'd bother buying it. Setting the FOV to 180 and using it on a normal monitor seems to give nearly the same amount of benefit without the absurd footprint. This device doesn't look like it does much for smoothing out wide angle aspects, which would be the only reason to purchase one in my opinion.
I just watched the video and it looks to me like all the have done is stretched the standard view to fill the 'dome'. This results in all objects that are at the edges of the dome to be stretched and way out of proportion. The "man at the right" is a prime example of this.
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
It's a $200 white, round umbrella. Then you still have to buy your own projector? I don't see anything new, apart from a new use for an umbrella.
How much does it cost to have a advertisement masqueraded as a story on Slashdot?
I've always wanted an HMD... now that I've seen this, I think... I would still rather have an HMD.
"Most people, I think, don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?"
It's impossible to get a 3D stereo setup with a non-planar display like this. One is better off spending their money on an autostereoscopic LCD monitor instead, which is more immersive.
"Politicians and diapers must be changed often, and for the same reason."
Correct me if I'm wrong, but wouldn't this require a specialized video card as well as software that's intended to make use of peripheral vision. If you don't have these things, it seems like they're just taking parts of the screen that would normally be inside your field of vision and moving it to the edges. The end result looks like you'd just have to turn your head to see what you'd normally be able to anyway.
That looks like it would give me motion sickness for some reason. Maybe it's due to everything being stretched out of proportion and whenever you turn it's constantly shrinking and expanding. I don't know but that looked like a piece of crap to me.
You're nothing; like me.
It seems pretty basic. You have a projector and a screen that resembles a halved sphere. Set the game to a wide FOV, project that onto the screen. The sides are distorted, but you get the kind of peripheral vision that you have in real life, except more distorted than normal, especially to the sides. Presumably you could compensate for that with software to some degree. Immersive gaming on the cheap is what this amounts to. It seems like a good idea in theory.
Would this be worth it, though? What does it get you that a normal widescreen display doesn't already offer? Perhaps if you're a fast-twitch gamer that needs (distorted) eyes in the back of your head, this would be useful. I'm not really in that category, though---if I was looking for eye candy hardware, I'd probably want it to, y'know, look good?
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My (non-crappy-TN) LCD screen is already rated at 178 degrees and looks good from about any angle. 2 extra degrees doesn't seem like that big of a deal. The image is going to look pretty narrow viewing it in those last 2 degrees of field.
...although it might be possible with a pixel shader, the hardware would really need to support other projection types than just standard 3-point (and with some hacking the transformation matrix, 2-point) perspective.
For a dome projection, you essentially need a linear fisheye projection out of the card, and the cards just don't do that.
You could do it in software, render a hemicube in the buffer, use a pixel shader to map the appropriate pixels onto the circle, done. Except that to get to 'done', you have to go through some very expensive (in terms of performance drop) steps.
Note that the image is very badly distorted towards the edges. To correct this, the image must be generated as a "fisheye" type image, with the proper FOV, which will entail altering the way the image is rendered--i.e. code access required. Note also significant luminance fall-off towards the edges--the light is striking the dome at such an oblique angle that it's failing to light it properly. Immersive gaming is pretty damn cool, and perhaps this unit will work well enough to catch on with some gamers. But what you REALLY need is one of these: http://www.gadgetmadness.com/archives/20040724-elumens_visionstation.php
Let me get this straight...this guy wants people to DONATE money to help him produce something he intends to sell to others for a profit? Start talking about shares in the company and we might have something to talk about, but I'm not going to donate money so this guy can build a "community" to help him start a for-profit business.
The demo shows the player standing up. Who is going to stand for 4 hours while they play their favorite game? ok, so you can sit down too, just had to mention it.. how about these:
1. Location of the projector: you have to set up your $200 dome a fair distance from your $$$ projector. So in your home, you're now sitting with your back to the wall facing your living room hoping no one walks between your dome and your projector, which must sit directly in front of you to project on the entire dome.
2. You actually LOSE screen resolution. you can do the same thing with your flat monitor (change the FOV to 180), it just looks funky, and the center of the screen now has fewer pixels and thus loses clarity.
This isn't the range over which you can see the screen, this is the amount of YOUR field of view that's covered by the screen.
This is the first display for which you'd pretty much NEED a virtual reality environment to use effectively. ^^
$200 bucks does not really looks doable unless they go for "projector not included". Plus you may like to play in stand-up position. Not to mention you shall also like projector's fan "background noise" and have some space to set all this thing up... Is it just me or 50" plasma still may deliver better in the long run?
Marcin
The perfect display for playing Duke Nukem Forever on my Phantom console!
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FPS games give me motion sickness already, but that's because the distorted areas of the game are projected onto a plane, and when I track something to the side or bottom of the screen I look directly at them. Having them off in my peripheral vision would seem to reduce that. Having the game create a sphere map instead of one plane of a cube map (which is what it's effectively doing when you expand the fov inside the game) would be even better, because it would eliminate the corner distortion.
I agree that the demo in the video did not look very good. Maybe if the projector and software were developed specifically for this type of screen it'd be better.
--I'm not talking about dance lessons. I'm talking about putting a brick through the other guy's windshield.-
I've got to say would you really want to stick your head in something called a Gay Dome?
1) rear projection onto a deeply curved screen? Getting even illumination at the edges, where the light is striking at an angle, is going to be quite a trick, due to Lambert's law.
2) How are they going to avoid the problem of washout and reduced contrast due to light from one side of the screen reaching the other side? This is always a problem with deeply curved screens. It's very noticeable in IMAX Dome (Omnimax) screens. The only system I've personally seen that avoided it was the original Cinerama screen, which was a very specially built screen made of hundreds of individual strips. And that only worked because the screen was huge and you were sitting very far from it.
Cinerama and IMAX screens are huge and far away. They're almost at optical infinity. The texture of the screen is invisible. There's very little binocular depth cues to tell you that you're looking at a flat screen, and if you move your head (as you always do unless it's in a clamp), that doesn't give you any parallax cues to speak of. This means that the screen itself is hard to see, and there are practically no binocular depth cues. That in turn means that there's nothing to contradict the numerous depth cues you get from any flat picture (light, shade, interposition, etc.--see any perceptual psychology text). The screen itself falls away, the non-binocular depth cues dominate, and you have a distinct feeling of being in 3D space.
But this is a small screen a short distance away from you. That means:
a) The texture of the screen may be visible unless they're using some rather special screen material.
b) Again, because it's a small screen a short distance away from you, there will be enough binocular disparity between your two eyes for you to form a stereo image: that will tell you that you're looking at flat image in a bowl, and in the battle between those cues and other cues, it's not clear which will win. The same thing will happen when you move your head. In fact, if you move your head a few inches, you will probably be far enough from the center, as a percentage of the radius, that the image will show geometrical distortions.
I am very, very, very skeptical that this system will produce a high-quality 3D-like image in the way the IMAX does, or Cinerama did.
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It takes up enormous amounts of space and is very inflexible. Also, it only works adequately in games where you can change the FOV. So, 200 bucks extra for projector users with a lot of extra space, you also have wiring problems and loads of other issues. I could see this working in arcades, but for most home users, it's just a bloody poor solution.
http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/01/08/1257258&from=rss
//holding out for the 5760x1200 version
3 feet wide, 2880x900 resolution, and no projector necessary.
Of course, it might be a bit pricy, but them's the breaks for something nice.
This might be great... for someone sitting alone in a dark room, playing a first person shooter.
This will roq! I can't wait to see "The Blue Max" in Cinerama again!
Oh. Wait. Maybe I can. But Cinerama rulz anyway.
If you really want a wider view and to feel more "immersed" into the game, I suggest taking a look at the curved three-in-one seamless monitor that Alienware is working on. Something like this seems much more promising, especially because you don't have to twist your head all the way to see the sides of the screen like with this 180 degree "display"
Disclaimer: I just picked one of the first links off of google to offer decent pictures of it, I'm not affiliated with legitreviews.com.
It's 2 sr FOV
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, it doesn't go away." - Philip K. Dick
OK, if it's going to do that... It's not a 180-degree FOV. It's a 2 Pi steradian FOV.
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, it doesn't go away." - Philip K. Dick
...misunderstandings arising from the way he pronounces the product name.
There's a good chance that interest in his "Gaydome" may come from from somewhat different quarters than he had in mind.
Most 3D games won't let you set the FOV to 180 degrees, since it's impossible using flat (pinhole?) projection that most of them use. This choice of projection is also why things look so distorted at the edges of the screen with a high FOV, and is why objects that are near you appear larger than objects in front of you, even when they're the same distance away, among other visual quirks. In order to show such a wide angle (approaching 180 degrees or above), you'd need to use a projection that's not limited to showing objects on one side of a plane, such as fisheye projection. This isn't normally done because it's technically simpler to do 3D rendering when straight lines in the world correspond to straight lines on the screen (that's the simplified explaination).
See this page for a visual comparison.
Duct tape, XML, democracy: Not doing the job? Use more.
This thing won't work. Increasing the FOV already causes terrible distorted images along the edges of your imagery. The very reason that I took back the Matrox Tripple Head2Go device a while back.
Now you take this stretched image and project it onto a dome. The stretched images get further streched as it is smeared along the edges of the dome.
Yes it is true that you don't see much detail in your periphery but you will be perfectly capable to interpret the direction of movement in your periphery vision. Because the perspective is distorted so badly you will feel a very uncomfortable dizzying sensation every time the camera direction changes.
If you are serious about Dome projection you will need to pre-distort the image before projecting it onto the dome. Something Graphics card drivers should be capable of in my opinion but in custom software easily achieved with a shader program.
You will want to check out Paul Burkes research here:
http://local.wasp.uwa.edu.au/~pbourke/projection/domemirror/
And in particular his paper:
http://local.wasp.uwa.edu.au/~pbourke/papers/dime2006/dime2006.pdf
There is also great distortion software that inserts itself between OpenGL/DirectX and the application here: http://immersaview.com/sol7.html
I am afraid that simply projecting on a Dome is just not good enough and will make you literally puke after 30 minutes or so.
This could be the coolest gaming video of 2008. I will show you why.
don't want to ruin his fun but... these are commonplace in japan. http://www.instablogsimages.com/images/2007/10/19/senjo-no-kizuna_48.jpg
Isn't this thing just the elumens projection screen (www.est-kl.com/projection/elumens/projection.html) without the proper distortion correction?
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Now, we just need to expand that out to 360 degrees, and we'll finally have a linear cockpit!
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Welcome to jDome, the world's first charity for supporting gamers developing substandard implementations of a cool idea. I know I wouldn't throw free money at a guy just so he can continue developing what is essentially a curved white surface. He doesn't even acknowledge that the distortion caused by projecting a flat image onto a curved surface is a problem, as one of his forum users brought up: http://www.jdome.com/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=8
Of course, if this guy does pull it off by sheer balls, and perhaps sometime down the line starts actually selling a decent product, more power to him. I just hope a bunch of hopeful gadget addicts don't end up tossing their money down a drain.
Combine a superior implementation of this idea with Johnny Lee's Wii head tracker and you'll have an amazingly immersive experience.
He lost me as soon as he said the word "patent".
This is similar to the Elumens Vision Station from years ago, only the vision station has a front-projection projector with a fish-eye lens. They also claim a 180 degree FOV.
I think that wide FOV displays are pointless given that a significant fraction of their intended target audience wears glasses, and their peripheral vision is severely limited. (I'm one of those)
Those who would give up liberty to obtain working drivers, deserve neither liberty nor working drivers.
I want to see my pr0n on that thing.
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looks jGay
eg. http://digitaltigers.com/zenview-arena-ultrahd.shtml ...not sure what graphics card I'd need though.
No sig today...
I remember playing with something pretty identical to this at E3, several years ago, a while before Flight Simulator X came out.
As I recall, it was more like 120-140 degrees rather than pretending it was full 180. Then again, I'm not convinced the jDome is true 180 either - think about it, one point, relatively close, projecting on to a hemisphere, by definition, can't get to the outtermost edges.
The experience was certainly cool and definitely added an immersive element.
It wasn't quite as cool as it promised to be though for the following reasons:
Projector resolution generally sucks - even now, 1080p projectors cost several thousand dollars vs. about $400 for a basic 24 inch 1920x1200 LCD monitor. Most likely, you're going to be hobbled with 720p which is on the low end of most gaming systems these days. Now factor in that 1280 horizontal resolution has to project both the normal ~60 degree view AND the sides. You're now at maybe the equivalent of 800x600 for the area your cheaper 1920x1200 monitor is showing. Sure, you get the edges - but at a massive cost to the center's clarity.
Whilst edges are nice, down is often pretty pointless. It looks great if you're flying with the instrument panel turned off. The moment you turn it on, that whole bottom half of the screen is now filled with your control panel and your legs. You've gone to all of this trouble and you see... a big grey panel and a nice rendering of legs moving pedals. Most FPSs are relatively planar and so, most of the time, all you see is the ground running underneath you. Sure, it's nice when you're shooting around an industrial complex with people above and below... but most of the time you're just trading resolution for watching empty space above and very close ground below. You'll notice our eyes are horizontal, giving a much wider field of view than a vertical one.
You generally need your input devices resting on something. Unless you spend a fortune on custom controllers, odds are you're going to need a keyboard and mouse for most FPSs, a keyboard, throttle, yoke and mouse for menus for flight sims. The table you need to put all of that on ends up obscuring half of your downward view anyway. Plus it tends to really suck, trying to use most input devices while standing anyway.
It's a fun concept. Much like shutter glasses and TrackIR, it's one that can add a whole lot of wow factor, albeit at the expense of real practical use. On the flip side, for those with money to burn, a 1080p projector, a fast gaming rig, shutter glasses to make it 3D as well and TrackIR to make swaying your head from side to side have a difference... it could be the ultimate show off gimick. Hopefully it'll be easy to wash, when motion sickness makes people vomit, too.
mod down for use of this horrid neologism
180-degree FOV has been done. A company called Elumens tried to make this 'innovative' product over half a decade ago. Our college had a few of them that were used for various research projects. If you Google 'Elumens' you'll probably run across this product.
This sounds remarkably like an investment scam...: "we are almost ready developing this thing. Just a few more tweaks and then we can go to market and clean up big time! We just need a bit more seeding money to finish development and set up production. Maybe that's something for you? Small investment, HUGE returns...!" Yada yada yada.
Don't touch it with a 10 foot pole!
The whole system will be costly
Good projector + the jDome = To much for just feeling the experience of the game.
Also It will just bring advantage over players who don't have the money to buy it.
RUPERT! I TOLD YOU TO WATCH THE BAGS! You were looking at the boys again, WEREN'T YOU.
... it will only display the letter "I", sans serif.
Research shows that 67% of those who use the term "research shows", are just making shit up.
I'm quite excited about the product. I already own a 4.5K lumens projector so the only cost for me will be the $200 plus shipping to the UK I can only just pick up a 17" monitor for that here and I think that dome will beat a tidgy little 17" monitor hands down. The point other people have mentioned and keeps being ignored is... Its designed to give you low quality peripheral vision so when the image degrades so what? your looking forwards and using the low quality part of your vision anyway. Im getting one and the first thing I do will be play Forza 2!
I'd rather strap to my head an helmet with motion tracking (wiimote hack?) and one or two of those new cheap laser projectors that can make an 800*600 image and are the size of a cigarette packet. Would probably get seasick within seconds due to the image lagging behind the head tracking, though. Bah, better go play Ultimate Disk In The Dark instead.
1) You'll get incredibly low resolution at the edges of the screen (think of the light rays gradually becoming tangents as they approach the edge of the "screen"). The very last six inches probably only has a couple of pixels covering it.
2) You need stand in the middle of nowhere with two or three meters of empty space between the projector and the screen. How many people could fit that into their living space?
3) Most of the screen is wasted. Humans have nearly 180 degrees horizontal FOV but only about 45 degrees vertically.
4) The "$200" price tag doesn't include a projector. Ooops!
I bet you could get a much better system by lying a standard monitor flat on its back then putting a dome-shaped mirror above it. The mirror would be more expensive then this thing but you won't need a projector so it'll be cheaper overall.
No sig today...
As many others have pointed out, this is a truly lame implementation of dome projection. He doesn't even try to transform the image properly for projection onto a sphere.
It's not a bad idea; it's just done badly. It would make a nice arcade game if done well.
You need to go into the game code to do this right, because you need a bigger field of view, and that affects the calculations of what's visible. This can create more work within the game. Not just rendering work, either; NPCs have to be active over a larger area.
I just saw "Speed Racer", the movie. As a movie, it's lame. As a game, it would be fun. As an arcade game with a steering wheel, pedals, and a wide field of view, it would be awesome.
Out of the closet, into jDome!
https://dalgamotor.wordpress.com/ - Elektronik beyinlere ozgurluk asisi (Turkish)
shit right now.
He needs some extra magic to add inverse-fisheye to the image coming out of the projector to make it appear correct to the user.
I certainly wouldnt donate to a project where there was exactly 1 of the product, that would just be ins@ne
There's probably a trick or two involved, if you knew what the tricks were you would be getting the headline. As it is, you're just a knowitall skeptical fuckass.
Scam. Nothing to see here, move along.
expandfairuse.org
Oh dear. I was thinking this was something really cool like a peice of hardware or software that remapped the image for projectong onto a curved surface. Nothing of the sort: it is just a dome screen. All he does is run Crysis with a custom field of view. There is no perspective correction, which mean that straight objects like trees and cranes are bowed on the screen. On top of that, his idea increases the viewable area, but not the pixel count. Indeed the pixel count would be less, unless you could afford a projector with the same resoultion as a decent LCD monitor.
You either need a fisheye lens to snap on to the projector, or some kind of computational remapping. One of the only games I know of that remap the image in this way is Fisheye Quake (http://strlen.com/gfxengine/fisheyequake/index.html), and it is much more computationally intensive than regular Quake. I'd imagine Fisheye Crysis would be a nightmare to get running at a decent framerate.
This product is limited to games only, and games that allow you to modify the fov at that (changing the fov doesn't make the image fisheyed). I'd quite happily pay for something similar that I could use every day for CAD/CAM work. I think if he could find/make a fisheye lens that snaps onto the front of a projector, and market it for a bit more, he'd be onto a winner.
Fisheye lenses are very expensive, so the only cheap solution would be projection off a hemispherical mirror (http://local.wasp.uwa.edu.au/~pbourke/projection/meshmapper/), but I can see a way of doing that by rear projection.
Anyway, I would be wary of buying something that the manufacturer admits is "simple wire-frame and scotch-taped numerus badly cut letter-sized papers". I can't really see how this has been patented, as there is plenty of prior art for rear projected domes out there.
A projector doesn't project pixels that would be offscreen on a normal monitor. Therefore all you are doing is stretching the pixels near the edges around you and moving them even further outside your peripheral vision. Hence, you see less. Good concept, stupid implementation. The concept however requires the 3d world to render the portions outside the normal view and maybe have a few projectors to project it around you to get a true 180 FOV.
We have built a digital planetarium at our school. On Fridays we hook up video games to the projector and play them in the round. It is very popular with the students in the class.
http://www.ESPACEacademy.com/
http://homepage.mac.com/dvhscience/SpaceAcademy/Projects/planetarium/planetariumconstruct.html
uhhh... I only see a screen that emulates 180 degrees... it's still the same viewing area, just being stretched to fit the jdome. Advertising seems very misleading since they say the lcd screen on a video game does not allow you to see any more than what the monitor can show. However, unless the gaming industry changes the panoramic projection of the image to accomodate for the jdome - it's still the same area you are watching, just "stretched" on an umbrella....
Thats a flat line, 2-D
Why would anyone want to stand up to play a game unless it was true VR? Also, what is the advantage over a dome rather then a 30" wide screen monitor :P
Obama = Socialism.
...this will be great when they shrink the size down to one per eyeball, then mount it in a headset... it's the only thing holding back VR.
How long will it be before they come out with a privacy film for this?
I saw one of these in action at GDC in February. While the concept is neat; the implementation is seriously lacking. The distortion of the image is really bad and the resolution was nothing to brag about. Of course the resolution was probably because of their projector, but still. It really wasn't all that great.
http://www.howstuffworks.com/elumens.htm
Not *quite* the same thing but pretty darn close. It never caught on (was expensive as hell though) and they sold their IP.
The monitor is claiming 180 degress of visibility... what article are you modding?