Realtime Dome Imaging and Interaction: Towards Immersive Design Environments

As engineering design becomes more and more complex, we predict that the field will look to immersive environments as a way to create more natural interactions with design ideas. But, helmets are bulky and awkward. A better solution for immersive design is a partial dome. Originally the exclusive domain of flight simulators, dome projection is now being brought to the masses with less expensive dome displays and because its immersiveness makes it such a unique design and display experience. A fisheye lens is needed for the projector to display across the nearly 180° of the dome. This necessarily introduces a distortion of the graphics that is being displayed through it. The trick is to then “pre-distort” the graphics in the opposite direction before sending it on to the projector. This paper describes the use of the OpenGL Shading Language (GLSL) to perform this non-linear dome distortion transformation in the GPU. This makes the development of dome-ready interactive graphics code barely different from developing monitor-only graphics code, and with little runtime performance penalty. The shader code is given along with real examples from our work with San Diego’s Reuben H. Fleet Science Center.Copyright © 2006 by ASME