Blender and Immersive Gaming in a Hemispherical Dome

In the following we will discuss a cost effective immersive gaming environment and the implementation in Blender [1], an open source game engine. This extends traditional approaches to immersive gaming which tend to concentrate on multiple flat screens, sometimes surrounding the player, or cylindrical [2] displays. In the former there are unnatural gaps between each display due to screen framing, in both cases they rarely cover the 180 horizontal degree field of view and are even less likely to cover the vertical field of view required to fully engage the field of view of the human visual system. The solution introduced here concentrates on seamless hemispherical displays, planetariums in general and the iDome [3] as a specific case study. The methodology discussed is equally appropriate to other realtime 3D environments that are available in source code form or have a suitably powerful means of modifying the rendering pipeline.