Case 9: High resolution dome displays and navigable movies

Return to index

Creating suitable imagery for the iDome requires both high resolution movies a well as a warping process that takes a movie as input and distorts it in such a way that the results looks correct on the dome. There are two types of movie input, the first is a movie made up of fisheye images, nothing special except to fully exploit the resolution of the projectors the fisheye frames need to be at least 1600x1600 pixels. Another more interesting input is a movie made up of full spherical projectons, while the movie is playing one is free to nagivate. These navigable movies, in order to make full use of the available resolution of the projection system need to be 4096 pixels wide by 2048 pixels tall.

For more information on navigable movies see this and for information on a QuickTime API based player see this. This is onlt possible due to the tight coupling now between QuickTime and the OpenGL API, indeed the performance hit to draw the movie frames onto a mesh is negligable.

Photos

 

Hardware

Mac Pro, ATI 1900XT graphics card