Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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.
It depends on the game. I've been using a Projector as my main gaming screen for the last 7 years or so. My current setup is an Optoma HD-73 throwing on to a 94"x94" Dalite Glass Bead Pull-Down. I use an Xbox 360 for most of my gaming.
some games become much easier to play, Fighting games, Racing Game, and Turn Based Role players. Other Games take some getting used to like FPSs and the Tony Hawk Series are nauseating at first due to the fast movement of the entire picture at once. Once you get used to it though, it's no different than playing on a normal screen.
Some games do suffer though. For instance I do much worse when playing FPSs or DDR games on the projector because I have to move my eyes around the screen to see everything. On a normal screen 100% of the on screen activity is in my field of view 100% of the time. Also playing the Wii on the projector is difficult, for one you often find yourself casting shadows on the screen, and there are other issues associated with the IR pointer that make using that aspect of the controller difficult at best.
Even still all Games are much more engaging and immersing on such a large screen IMO... I wouldn't trade my gaming setup for any alternative... Playing on a normal screen after the projector just seems cheesy by comparison.
Collector's Edition
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.
I have a Mitsubishi HC4000U and a 120" screen. After trying a couple of rather expensive but unexpectedly lousy screens from a local home theater store, I made one myself using screen material I got on eBay. For about four hundred bucks in tools and materials it turned out better than a three-thousand-dollar screen from HTX.
:) The way to solve this problem is to lay off the booze and move a little farther away from the screen. From the very start you need to carefully choose the size of the screen that's appropriate for your projector and the size of your theater room.
The setup works great with xbox 360 and PS3. Some people get dizzy playing Battlefield II or GTA 4, especially after a cigar or a couple of martinis
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.