new approach to CAVE Automated Virtual Environment,cheap enough to have in own garage

[lightburn]

edited, got contacted by Jeri, patent issues

[JohnYayas]

That's pretty interesting. What do you do? Sit in a swivel chair or something? It doesn't look tall enough to stand and move much. What kind of VR are you projecting in there?
I can't effectively use the VR glasses because I am far sighted so it would be nice to use a dome like that and not have to deal with goggles at all.

[buffo]

First, welcome to PhotonLexicon! Always nice to see new members - especially once who are working on cool shit! (And make no mistake, this is very cool...) I, too, have messed around with the Gear VR, and while it's very fun, it's not really ready for prime time. Another member here (Lazerjock) has the Samsung 360 camera, and he's uploaded a few videos that can be viewed with the Gear VR headset that are really nice though. I'd love to see what that would look like in a dome...

Where are you located? We often have get-togethers in various places around the country (and indeed, around the world), so if there's something going on near where you're located, I'm sure folks would be interested to see what you're working on. (Like I said, this project of yours is seriously cool!)

With regard to this project though, I'm a bit confused: The small projectors that are mounted on the glasses... These are the light engines from those tiny pico-projectors, right? Something like the guts out of one of these?



If so, then how are you getting the display field to be wide enough to fill the dome? (Or even half of it...) Even with a large lens, surely this is only projecting an image over a portion of the dome that is directly in front of the viewer? Perhaps a 30 or 40 degree projection field at most? So you only see the virtual world through a rectangular frame (or even a frame distorted by a fish-eye lens) that moves around the dome as you move your head? Surely you can't widen the image enough to give you 120 degrees or greater field of view? Or am I missing something here?

As for using fiber optics to separate the DLP chip from the light engine, that's something I don't have much experience with. Off the cuff though, I wouldn't think this would be a terribly difficult problem. True, coupling a non-coherent light source into a single fiber is tricky, but since your goal is simply to evenly illuminate the DLP chip that dramatically simplifies things. Also, you're only talking about 3 or 4 feet of fiber. There's no reason why you couldn't use very larger diameter fiber and/or multiple strands of cheap fiber, both of which would make coupling a lot easier. I would think that 50% efficiency would be a given even with the cheapest multimode fiber, and 70 to 80 % should be possible with a little work.

There's a member here (Aron Bacs, aka Lumia, from Orlando) who might be able to suggest something. I'll send him a reminder to check this thread...

With the dome you've been using and the smaller, glasses-mounted projectors, how would you rate the resulting effect, especially compared to the videos you posted of the room-sized displays?

Adam