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Screen With 180 Degree Field of View
Posted by
ScuttleMonkey
on Mon May 12, 2008 03:17 PM
from the exercizes-in-skepticism dept.
from the exercizes-in-skepticism dept.
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.
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Ya $200 bucks and... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Ya $200 bucks and... (Score:5, Interesting)
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
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Re:Ya $200 bucks and... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Re:Ya $200 bucks and... (Score:5, Funny)
tosser
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Re:Ya $200 bucks and... (Score:4, Funny)
Projectors and 30" monitors may be great and all, but how do you get them into the toilet?
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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.
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Newer Projectors do much much better in terms of displaying in a lit room... but they'll never reach the same visibility as a traditional screen.
Think of it this way... The screen you're projecting on is white... The color of the screen when the projector is off is the darkest black you will
Re:Ya $200 bucks and... (Score:5, Informative)
Im not sure where this is coming from. I bought a mitsubishi 720p project for $800 over a year ago, and aside from a few key difference its pretty much equivalent to an lcd tv.
The main hassel with a projector is that you need a sound system and you have to deal with light levels.Keep in mind that whatever your wall/screen looks like is what blacks are going to look like.
I was worried about bulb burn out when I got my projector, but out of the projected 2000-3000 hour lamp life, ive only clocked ~650, so in my case ill likely replace the projector before the bulb.
If you can take care of all that then its basically a 90+in lcd tv for a fraction of the cash.
Some people mention resolution concerns, but for console gaming almost no games render at anything above 720p. Even games like gta4 that support 1080p just upscale.
If 1080p movies or PC output are a requirement then theres always 1080p projectors, their still around $2k but that price has been dropping quickly. I assume if youre playing Crysis at 2560x1600 that price is no object.
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180 degrees? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:180 degrees? (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:180 degrees? (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:180 degrees? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:180 degrees? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:180 degrees? (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:180 degrees? (Score:4, Funny)
rj
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Re:180 degrees? (Score:5, Informative)
You can find your own FOV:
1. Draw two dots on a white board and measure the distance between them
2. Stand in the middle of these two points, but far away from the board
3. Start moving closer until the two dots disappear from your vision (of course, keep looking in the middle)
4. Measure your distance to the board when the dots have disappeared
5. Use middle-school math to figure out the angle
I found mine to be roughly 120 degrees
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Interesting but not compelling (Score:2, Informative)
The issue is the projection (Score:5, Interesting)
See this page [strlen.com] for a visual comparison.
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Just flat projection on a doomed surface (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Just flat projection on a doomed surface (Score:5, Informative)
If I were going to invest in tech like this I'd rather play on one of those wrap-around style displays that are basically just a semi-circular monitor... better image that way.
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The flat projection is partially hardware... (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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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:Just flat projection on a doomed surface (Score:4, Informative)
It would also require some really careful calibration by the user.
All around.. product gets a big thumbs down from me as well.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
It'd still be good enough to give you plenty of peripheral vision, but you can't turn your head to focus on it
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 gi
Re:Just flat projection on a doomed surface (Score:4, Informative)
better video of the sphere in action:
http://learners.gsfc.nasa.gov/mediaviewer/sphere2/ [nasa.gov]
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These guys at CMU did some (I think) cooler work [cmu.edu] a while ago.
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a $200 umbrella? (Score:5, Informative)
Serious flaw--stereoscopy impossible (Score:2)
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Polarized projectors and glasses works just fine on a curved surface. (Computation's a tad different, but so what?
Motion sickness? (Score:5, Interesting)
Maybe less motion sickness. (Score:4, Interesting)
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Donate?? (Score:3, Insightful)
Excellent! (Score:3, Funny)
Texture; parallax; uneven illumination; washout... (Score:5, Informative)
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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Alienware's alternative (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
It's NOT a 180 FOV (Score:2)
Re:It's NOT a 180 degree FOV (Score:2)
donate? (Score:3, Interesting)
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 [youtube.com] and you'll have an amazingly immersive experience.
Flight Sim X Preview At E3, Years Ago (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
No perspective correction! (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
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Read the fine article. (Score:2)
This is the first display for which you'd pretty much NEED a virtual reality environment to use effectively. ^^
Re:bad image, bad lighting (Score:4, Funny)
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