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.

Comments

Ya $200 bucks and...

[ZonkerWilliam]

How much more for the projector? won't come cheap no matter how you look at it.

Re:Ya $200 bucks and...

[LurkerXXX]

A larger monitor fills more of your field of view, making you feel more immersed into the scene.

Personally I got a big monitor so I could see a lot of code and a few different windows together on the same screen. A more engaging game play experience was just a big side benefit.

180 degrees?

[Lilith's Heart-shape]

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?

Re:180 degrees?

[Firehed]

Peripheral vision doesn't really count though. While you're technically seeing that area, it's more of a dinosaur-esque movement detection than anything else. Have someone wave their hand around to the side of your head and you'll see it. Then try to count how many fingers they're holding up. Good luck.

Re:180 degrees?

[Robert1]

I don't disagree. But its certainly more immersive to have something moving there than not.

Donate??

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Just flat projection on a doomed surface

[bugnuts]

Aye, and due to the hemi-spherical display, the pixels will be stretched significantly at the edges.

It'd still be good enough to give you plenty of peripheral vision, but you can't turn your head to focus on it ... you have to rotate your game character so that you get good resolution from the center.

The pros are kind of cool - you can set your FOV in-game to 180 degrees (which normally gives a fish-eye look) and this projection will get rid of the fish-eye and put it back into normal viewing. This will give you cool peripheral vision and a bigger FOV.

The cons are that it looks like you have to play in the dark, resolution limited to the projector, stretched pixels on the edges (and much darker, unless changed in software).

It looks like an interesting niche for FPS games, but I'd be very surprised if it sold more than 2500 units in a year.

Re:The flat projection is partially hardware...

[should_be_linear]

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. Not really, this transformation can be done easily by lookup table where each pixel of distorted destination bitmap is mapped to one pixel in the source (undistorted) bitmap. Remember Second Reality Demo and bald guy? It worked smoothly on 486 (AFAIK).

Re:Texture; parallax; uneven illumination; washout

[hob42]

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. I don't think anyone sinking a whopping $200 into this should reasonably expect a high-quality experience comparable to IMAX.

Re:The issue is the projection

[togofspookware]

Of course, by 'objects that are near you appear larger than objects in front of you', I meant 'objects to the side look larger than objects straight ahead' :P

This effect is especially distracting when a game uses dense fog - the engine deems objects to the side to be closer to you (since they're not as far *straight ahead* of you, but they ignore distance in the other dimensions), and thereby not as fogged. Sometimes you won't be able to see a wall if you're looking straight at it, but if you turn a bit it'll appear!

There seems to be quite a bit of misunderstanding on this subject, as I can't even find mention in the 3D Projection wikipedia article of the fact that linear projection isn't entirely realistic (well, it mimics a pinhole camera realistically, but if you're trying to simulate a regular camera lens, or a person's eyeball, the fisheye projection is really what you want - linear projection is only an approximation that happens to work well for low FOV values).

If you want some first-hand experience with the fisheye projection, go stand in a long straight hallway and look directly at the wall. Of course, the corners along the floor and ceiling won't appear to be perpendicular (as they do in most FPSes, even with the FOV turned way up) - they will appear to curve towards points at the outer edge of your vision. The world would be a very strange place if this weren't true!