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 monitoronly 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.