Automatic Alignment Of High-Resolution Multi-Projector Displays Using An Un-Calibrated Camera

Automatic Alignment Of High-Resolution Multi-Projector Displays Using An Un-Calibrated Camera: "Automatic Alignment Of High-Resolution Multi-Projector Displays Using An Un-Calibrated Camera
Full text Full text available on the Publisher sitePublisher Site
Source VISUALIZATION archive
Proceedings of the 11th IEEE Visualization 2000 Conference (VIS 2000) table of contents
Year of Publication: 2000
ISBN:0-7803-6478-3
Authors
Yuqun Chen
Douglas W. Clark
Adam Finkelstein
Timothy Housel
Kai Li
Publisher
IEEE Computer Society Washington, DC, USA
Additional Information:

abstract index terms collaborative colleagues
Tools and Actions: Find similar Articles Review this Article
Save this Article to a Binder Display Formats: BibTex EndNote ACM Ref

ABSTRACT

A scalable, high-resolution display may be constructed by tilingmany projected images over a single display surface. One fundamentalchallenge for such a display is to avoid visible seams dueto misalignment among the projectors. Traditional methods foravoiding seams involve sophisticated mechanical devices and expensiveCRT projectors, coupled with extensive human effort forfine-tuning the projectors. This paper describes an automatic alignmentmethod that relies on an inexpensive, uncalibrated camera tomeasure the relative mismatches between neighboring projectors,and then correct the projected imagery to avoid seams without significanthuman effort.
"

Computers and Art Meld in Virtual Reality Underworld

Computers and Art Meld in Virtual Reality Underworld

May 13, 2007

Visitors to Duke virtual reality chamber view mythological world through 3-D glasses | Megan Morr

Computers and Art Meld in Virtual Reality Underworld

Duke's DiVE project proves a mecca for research and education

Wednesday, June 28, 2006

Durham, N.C. -- Doves swirl over the heads of a small group of travelers, one bird carrying a branch in its beak. But the scene suddenly changes to a copse of moss-hung trees, one sporting a golden bough. Then, it changes again.

• Computing and Technology
• Education and Training
• Faculty

Now the travelers, all wearing strange dark glasses, are racing down a river through a rapids-splashed chasm. Finally, they reach the calmness of a dock lined with fancifully shaped boats, one looking like a multicolored scorpion.

All in all, an exciting journey -- made possible by Duke undergraduates taking their first plunge into programming virtual reality, a method that uses computers to create artificial worlds.

The "trip" took place in late spring during an open house at the Pratt School of Engineering, where visitors could sample "Visions of the Underworld," an evolving virtual reality dreamscape of mythological themes being created by Duke arts and sciences students.

Computer scientist Rachael Brady is the 'Oz' behind the DiVE | Megan Moor

The event marked an early public demonstration of the power of the DiVE -- the world-class virtual reality chamber built by Rachael Brady's Visualization Technology Group on the ground floor of the Fitzpatrick Building.

"I think it's awesome," said rising senior Bart Bressler, a computer science major who created part of one dreamscape scene. "It has been one of the best experiences I have had at Duke."

DiVE is an acronym for "Duke Immersive Virtual Environment," the lower case "i" reflecting the role of Apple iPods in Duke teaching and learning. In a bit of irony, although DiVE uses some Apple technology, Microsoft Windows provides most of the backbone software driving six computers to create separate and coordinated color images that are projected on the walls, floor and ceiling of the six-sided chamber.

People entering the chamber, which measures roughly 9.5 feet per side, don special stereoscopic glasses to get enveloped in an apparent three-dimensional reality -- complete with surround sound -- that can become whatever programmers want it to be. Many scenes call for the deft touch of an interactive joystick -- technically, a 3-D computer mouse -- to drive the action forward.

Brady, the Oz behind the DiVE, is a Pratt research scientist and adjunct associate professor in the computer science department. She came to Duke in 2002 from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where she directed a similar virtual reality chamber called the CAVE.

Brady oversaw the planning and construction of the DiVE, which is one of only seven such systems worldwide. The National Science Foundation provided funding.

Since its opening in November 2005, the DiVE -- also called the Visroom -- has become an extended laboratory for numerous scientists and engineers from Duke and beyond.

Among the DiVErs, a graduate student in civil and environmental engineering created a virtual forest for studying how wind affects seed dispersal. Biochemists are simulating complex protein molecules and evaluating spatial relationships among them.

Biomedical engineers plan to build giant simulated hearts they can "crawl" through, and a medical student is evaluating ways to use the chamber for teaching anatomy. Cognitive neuroscientists are manipulating the contents of simulated rooms to test how humans sense that objects have been rearranged. And a medical student studying to be an orthopedic surgeon is working with a virtual automobile driving simulator to evaluate how soon people recovering from bone fractures can safely get behind the wheel again.

Arts and humanities researchers and teachers also see the potential of virtual reality. In an interdisciplinary convergence of interests, Rachael Brady is working with Clare Woods, an assistant professor of classics, and other arts-oriented professors at Duke and elsewhere to develop a mythological realm within the DiVE as an undergraduate teaching tool.

"It appeals to my creative side," Woods said of her venture in virtual reality. "What we hope for ultimately is this huge experience where we'll have interconnections between different imagined other-worlds."

Given her interests in the Medieval era, Woods first hoped to summon up the dreams of Hildegard of Bingen, a 12th century visionary and composer. "But my students are mostly classicists, and when I asked what they would like to see in the DiVE, they said 'the Aeneid, the Underworld!' So we started with that."

In preparation, Woods took a Brady-taught short course on the virtual reality software, called Virtools, used to program scenes. "You don't need that much knowledge to actually create some interesting scenes, so you can have students from classical literature and the arts doing this," said Robert Duvall, a Duke computer science lecturer who first got exposed to virtual reality as a Brown University graduate student.

As Woods explored a new way to teach the classics, Brady grappled with new methods to teach undergraduates who are more oriented toward engineering.

"Engineers typically are trained to find convergent solutions to problems," Brady said. "They go out and find information that will meet a set of specifications and use that to derive a solution. What's missing in a lot of engineering education is at the brainstorming level.

"I'm trying to teach students how to think more divergently -- more as art students are taught," she said. "I've been communicating with art professors, reading about art and teaching my students how to draw. I'm teaching them how to communicate visually. I'm making them keep sketchbooks of their concepts, and emphasizing drawing with paper and pencil."

Students of Anya Belkina, a Duke assistant professor of the practice of visual arts, and Wayne Godwin, an art and design professor at East Carolina University, have joined the project.

Using a modeling software called Maya, Godwin's class designed an animated virtual version of the three-headed watchdog Cerberus in the mythological Greek underworld. It's this creature that snarled and snapped throughout one scene in the DiVE's open-house production.

Student-designed virtual coins will tip 'underworld' ferryman | Megan Moor

Godwin's students are now constructing another scene that features a virtual image of Charon, the mythological ferryman who carries travelers down the underworld river Acheron. Belkina's students already have created a number of virtual coins that travelers can use to tip the ferryman and win passage.

As students with varied interests worked out scenes to be transferred into Maya and Virtools, they relied on sketching as their common mode of communication. The students divided the labor, with Woods' students using storyboards and sketch paper to lay out classical scenes and objects that Belkina's and Godwin's groups then transferred into digital form

David Zielinsky, a programmer in Brady's Visualization Technology Group, joined Woods and three computer science students -- Bart Bressler, Patrick Paczkowski and Stephen Reading -- in doing the bulk of the work with Virtools.

In its current incarnation, the virtual production "Visions of the Underworld" draws primarily from Greek myths. But undergrads are beginning to insert elements from the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh -- and plans are in the works to add Norse myths later.

Work on "Visions" began in summer 2005 when a visiting student from Spelman College in Atlanta set the opening scene for Tartarus, the Greek hell, by creating a glowing river of fire. The display imparts a startling illusion of depth and space to the DiVE's claustrophobic confines, as viewers look over the glowing scene from a virtual precipice -- and then plunge headlong into the abyss.

Duke students have since added a number of other creative episodes. In a scene called "Cerberus Gets Distracted by a Cake," for example, pushing a joystick button launches some virtual cakes in the direction of a virtual dog bowl.. If the barking Cerberus gets distracted by the food, viewers get to float safely past him along a forested path.

A different scene borrowing from Gilgamesh requires the joystick operator to knock three times on a virtual door -- which reverberates and creaks open in response -- in order to gain admittance to a fortress guarded by fanciful leggy monsters.

In still another scene, intended to create the illusion of weight in computer-generated objects, a joystick operator strikes virtual balls with a virtual paddle. Onlookers then try to deduce differences in the balls' masses by observing their different flight paths into virtual space.

At the spring 2006 open house, participating undergraduates and their professors got a chance to view, admire, criticize and play with their first year's results.

"It was my first class with the Maya program, and it was really useful learning how to model and animate," said graduating senior Lauren Barry as she emerged from her DiVE session. "We wanted to make something cool that would be fun to do in the DiVE," added a pumped-up Michael Faber, one of Belkina's students who designed the scorpion boat at the end of the Golden Bough scene.

"Very convincing environments can be crafted in Virtools and transferred to the DiVE," said senior Drew Evans, a student who learned the virtual reality software in a fall 2005 independent study project and then worked with Woods' group in the spring. "As the technology improves, almost anything will be possible."

Bart Bressler, who created the "guess their mass" ball game, hopes next year to create a sword fight that would culminate with the severing of Cerberus' heads. As with the ball game, he expects the virtual swords to convey the illusion of weightiness.

He also eagerly anticipates revisiting the DiVE at future open houses as a Duke alumnus. "It would be really cool to see how later students expand on the project, to really see how the whole thing works," he said. "We're just in the early stages right now."

Organizers hope the "Visions of the Underworld" project might become part of the Focus Program for first year undergraduate students, which features interdisciplinary experiences and seminar-sized classes centered around themes in the arts and sciences.

For more information, contact: Monte Basgall | (919) 681-8057 | monte.basgall@duke.edu

All His Rooms Are Living Rooms - New York Times

All His Rooms Are Living Rooms - New York Times:

Ed Alcock for The New York Times

Ed Alcock for The New York Times

off the wall Patrick Blanc, a French botanist who made his name with the plant wall, is an unusual mix of scientist and artist.

By KRISTIN HOHENADEL

Published: May 3, 2007

Créteil, France

The Miracle Polymer for the New Millennium

The Miracle Polymer for the New Millennium
Building with ETFE

Grimshaw Architects

Earthpark, 2010

The $155 million Earthpark project in Pella, Iowa, is an American-style Eden Project from the original Eden designers, Grimshaw Architects. ETFE will be used for the roof of this massive indoor rainforest biodome, which will house three Amazonian climates on 70 acres. ETFE’s natural insulating properties considerably enhance the project’s green factor, too.

Read the story
Reader comments

More Slide Shows

index

Virtusphere


Founders of VirtuSphere, Inc.
see future development and
application of VirtuSphere
technology.
We are looking for partners who
are capable to help to reach true
capitalization of developed
technologies and experience.
Q: Where can I see a VirtuSphere in action?
A: With 18 systems built to date, VirtuSpheres are now located in Washington D.C.,
Moscow, Redmond, Seattle, Saint-Petersburg, Binghamton and Almetyevsk. Please
view our videos: www.virtusphere.com/videos

Tech as dirty as aviation - IT Director - Breaking Business and Technology News at silicon.com

Tech as dirty as aviation - IT Director - Breaking Business and Technology News at silicon.com: "The global IT industry accounts for two per cent of the world's carbon dioxide emissions - the same amount the world's aviation industry churns out, according to analyst house Gartner.

The estimate is based on the amount of energy PCs, servers, cooling, fixed and mobile phone systems, LANs, office telecommunications and printers all use within the world's offices."

So IT can make a difference here too. (But in the winter, IT energy probably reduces heating expenditures.)

Papervision3D

Papervision3D:

WiiFlash released

April 8th, 2007 by C4RL05

WiiFlash allows you to control your Flash games and applications with the revolutionary Wiimote.

www.danceball.com

www.danceball.com: "

		Contact us FOR MORE DETAILS!!
	These balls can be used oudoors for games and special effects or as part of the scenery for a set!
... also for childrens	giant balls

TeRK Telepresence Robot Kit

TeRK Telepresence Robot Kit: "Community Robotics

The TeRK project has received a three year grant from Intel to conduct research into community robotics. The project, entitled Neighborhood Nets is an interdisciplinary research project that combines design, art, qualitative research, informal learning, and engineering to discover and describe how communities do, or might, make use of emerging networked technologies (such as the Qwerk) through interviews, participant observation, workshops, and participatory design. Thank you Intel!"

FEATURED ROBOT

This robotic flower blossoms, wilts, tracks objects moving in front of it, and can catch a ball. Check out the recipe to build your own.

TaxShift 2008

Let's make sure that the next president is elected with a Tax Shift mandate.
Repeat after me:

Save Money
Save the Planet
Stop taxing income
Start taxing carbon
TaxShift 2008

See ...
http://www.carbontax.org/
http://taxshift.org/ "Tax what I take, not what I make"

InventGeek.com PhotoBioReactor

InventGeek.com PhotoBioReactor

Final Thoughts:
So after running for 2 weeks we have a very healthy culture. The night after we set this up and got it running we had a cold snap and we had a little ice form in the tubes.There is lots of great work going on with photo bio reactors. Check out these links:

Photo Bio Reactor Project
Coal Power Plant Reactor

GE Sharing | Start

GE Sharing | Start

GE Sharing – Use Google Earth™ together

„What I see is what you get!“
With GE Sharing, you are able to use Google Earth together with friends and business partners on different computers no matter where they are. Your connected partner can see all things you do in Google Earth in real time. So talk to your partner on the phone and plan vacation trips, explore the planet or do "online-sightseeing" together.

During your GE Sharing session you are able to switch roles, so that your partner controls your Google Earth window and you can see every place he opens in his or her Google Earth window.

You can find more detailed information on how it works in our FAQ
.

GoogleEarth as Swiss Army Knife

http://www.casa.ucl.ac.uk/andy/qt/ParisClouds.html
http://web.comhem.se/janmelin/ElCapPanoAnaglyph.mov
http://digitalurban.blogspot.com/search/label/Google%20Earth%20Panoramas

Google Earth Community: COM API (beta! beta! beta!)

Google Earth Community: COM API (beta! beta! beta!):
lots of clues here...

"This is how to control Google Earth from Python:
Code:

import win32com.client

googleEarth =  win32com.client.Dispatch('GoogleEarth.ApplicationGE')
while not googleEarth.IsInitialized():
  print 'waiting for Google Earth to initialize'

#googleEarth.OpenKmlFile('test.kml')
googleEarth.SetCameraParams( 41.487942634608913, -81.686570904088171, 0.0, 1, 150.00011938469936, 70.000000000947935, -127.30257903894255, 100)
"

Digital Urban: Using Google Earth as a Panorama Viewer

Digital Urban: Using Google Earth as a Panorama Viewer: "


While capturing screengrabs for our tutorial on creating panoramas from Google Earth we got thinking that you could use the Earth itself as a panoramic image viewer.

All of our panoramas on the blog cover a 360x180 degree field of view - ie a sphere. By adding a new Google Earth overlay you can load a panoramic image and wrap it around the globe, thus allowing you to use the Earth as a viewer.
"

gladwell.com: The Case for Geothermal

gladwell.com: The Case for Geothermal: "The Case for Geothermal"
Not hot rocks: just exploiting temperatures 6 feet down!

SketchUp to IMVU

SketchUp to IMVU: "Exporting Your SketchUp Model to IMVU

Google’s free version of SketchUp was initially created for the ease of creating models to be placed in their Google Earth application. Incidentally, this is the same format we will be using to export into the IMVU Previewer.

Conduit : Conduit for Google Earth Pro : Overview

Conduit : Conduit for Google Earth Pro : Overview
Conduit for Google Earth Pro enables users of geographic information to move seamlessly beyond the desktop and into large scale virtual environments.

Conduit for Google Earth Pro may be configured to provide:

	Stereoscopic viewing for true depth perception and more insightful data analysis
	Real-time changes in viewing perspective as the user moves within the virtual environment
	Intuitive navigation and interaction using advanced virtual reality input devices
	1:1 scale viewing on immersive visualization systems including multi-projector flat or curved screens, walk-in immersive rooms, or reconfigurable multi-wall displays
	Enhanced resolution output using cluster-based, multiprojector, tiled displays

u n y p e . c o m

u n y p e . c o m

multi-user google earth, now !

Use your existing Skype account for a multi-user Google Earth experience

3D Connexion Releases Software Development Kit

3D Connexion Releases Software Development Kit

3Dconnexion says the new SDK includes instructions and examples of application source code, as well as code samples in C+, Visual Basic and Java. In addition, 3Dconnexion offers several support resources exclusively for developers, including a developer’s forum (www.3Dconnexion.com/forum) and dedicated e-mail support.