RESEARCH:
REAL TIME WARPING AND EDGE BLENDING
ABOUT:
One of the most difficult hurtles to overcome in working in a dome is having content that is properly warped to the curved surface and edge blending all the projectors, so it appears as one continuous image. Wonder Dome partnered with industry leading Vortex Immersion Media to test drive and create custom plug-ins for their real-time, custom Touch Designer warping and blending tool. 
Vortex’s Touch Designer software patch for real-time warping and edge blending was in development for about four years.
Jeff Smith of Eye Vapor, created the patch. Essentially, Jeff’s patch is a 3D environment, where each projector is set up as a camera inside Touch Designer’s 3D space. The cameras are set to the same resolution and the same throw distance, lensing, etc. as the real world projectors. In the patch, each camera (projector) becomes part of a full square image up, to 4000 x 4000 pixels, that is then placed on a 3D sphere in Touch Designer. Because we were doing so much real-time processing, and we did not need to simply play one continuous high-resolution movie, most of our content was created at a 2000 x 2000 dome master. As simples as this is to explain, it is actually rather complex and in-between the cameras and the sphere there is four years worth of coding and networking to get the projectors to warp and blend in real time.
GOALS:
- Create Plug-Ins to Vortex Immersion Media's custom Touch Designer Warping/Blending tool.
- Ability to drag and drop any content into a system and have it warp and blend in real time.
- Ability to use content that is not specifically warped for the dome in the asset itself.
TECHNOLOGY
Derivative Touch Designer
Vortex Immersion Media Custom Warping/Blending Patch
Custom Built PC Media Server
NVIDIA graphics card
Black Magic.
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