jDome surrounds you with 180-degrees of gaming and public shame
By Joshua Fruhlinger 
posted May 12th 2008 11:53AM
posted May 12th 2008 11:53AM
posted May 12th 2008 11:53AM
A look back on popular stories from today in a specific year.
Now that we've thrown 'em off the trail, use the form below to get in touch with the people at Engadget. Please fill in all of the required fields because they're required.
This idea, only more professionally implemented and 100x less shitty, could be really cool.
Like.... ceiling mounted over my bed? totally!
Got to give them the thumbs up for using google sketchup tho
I agree. This is essentially where we're heading. Monitors/TVs are getting bigger and bigger, we moved to widescreen to get a more panoramic viewport, there's now even curved LCDs made for more immersive gaming. Eventually we'll just hop into a half-sphere (or maybe full-sphere), like Disneyland's panorama theater (or whatever the heck that thing was called).
the "pixels" toward the edges would be all stretched because of the curvature of the hemisphere. i fail to see how this is any better than a bigger monitor.
Like this perhaps.
The "iDome" provides a full, correct 180 field of view, no stretching.
http://local.wasp.uwa.edu.au/~pbourke/projection/UnityiDome/
The downside is that a game needs to be modified to create the fisheye projections
A good thing to buy if you want to ensure never getting a girlfriend....
http://www.engadget.com/2006/10/16/caption-contest-hmd-of-the-future/
You could probably still get a date with her!
Maybe you didn't pay attention to the inventor, but he was never in any danger of having a girlfriend.
That guy is genuinely creepy. I don't like looking at him.
I disagree I think the gaydome will prove your manliness to women!
a dorky logo and tag line arent helping matters either
all the i-______ products been invented. we've moved onto j-_____ now...
And words like what he said at 3:02 will further ensure it's demise.
"You are taking your first stepsss, into a larger world... Don't stand still..."
(There was extra stressss on nthe esses at the end of "stepsssss".)
at 1:01 it sounds like he is saying gay-dome. lol
I heard the same.
it seems like a good idea for Internet gaming cafe but the cost and having to stand and the room needed and the quality of the video and having to change the setting for every game....
ok its no longer a good idea, its simply an idea.
J-dome? I thought this had something to do with getting in on with a jewish girl. Man was I disappointed to see guy...
hahahaha another power glove.....just useless
I'd totally forgotten about the Power Glove! Surely the technology is here today to make a new one more awesome than ever before?
This is CRAP-tastic, I don't see how it would work very well unless games are programmed as such, the views become horribly distorted once you start leaving the center of the screen.
What game is that? It looks like half life 2.
Crysis. Ugh, this "dome", really skewed the edges of the screen.
Part of it is Half-Life 2, when he's talking about the peripheral vision and you see the image of the crane, that's half-life 2
Props to the guy for thinking this up and spending time meoney and effort on his dream and creation.
Having said that I think he's going for the wrong target market. The average consumer, even the hardcore simply will not buy this, for obvious reasons really i.e. size, cost (projector) e.t.c.
However there is a potential for him to sell it to places such as game conferences for booths and tournaments big LANs e.t.c.
I forgot to mention that as well as spending meony, he must have also spent a lot of money on it as well.
apologies.
Its crysis
Done well, this is pretty cool. Kinda like the hang glider ride in the California Adventure theme park at Disneyland. I don't know it this one could include the smell of oranges, though...
I'm going to sue this guy. I went to "gay dome dot com", like he said, and what I saw there was... well, lets just say that I'm now scarred for life. I have no idea what the contents of the site had to do with computer games...
I can't believe that you actually typed a URL with "gay" in and visited it.
What are Engadget readers all gay or something? Perhaps I should go somewhere else then.
jDome.... is that brought to you by the same people who do jDate?
Where the hell would you put that ugly ass thing? Re-tar-ded.
Um, yeah, you can stand "surround yourself" with action but it doesn't give you any more field of vision. You're seeing the same thing that you would on a flat screen... but I don't know anything about anything.
That's why you increase the fov setting in games.
good for pron now that i see it, surround yourself with 180 degrees of pron LMAO
Not sure what pron is but im sure I don't want to be surrounded by it!!!!!!!!!!!
LMAO PRON!!!11!!11!ONEONE.
Seriously, what's wrong with saying porn?
Epic fail presented by: Matt.
its funny when you say pron
porn is old now
porn = pron lol for the ones that are old school
So I epic fail because I can spell?
He meant 'pr0n'.
the prospect of said idea is quite risibile, indeed
This is a great idea. However, I suspect the cost of projectors will have to come down first in order to make this system more marketable to the average gamer. Perhaps an inexpensive Laser Video Projector would do the trick.
Not a bad idea but agree, needs refinement.
I'm pretty sure my university had a setup similar to this that used a old-skool-satellite-tv- dish sized dome and a DLP projector with a fish eye lens. Oh yeah, and that was back in 2003. With the image refreshing at 60hz the flickr was visible in your periphery vision which gave you one hell of a headache.
it looks like it makes the whole game into tunnel vision
So they finally stopped using the i-prefix, only to move onto j?
This is really easy to make. Just make a dome shaped wire frame and attach diffuser material or even cotton sheets to it. Im sure some places you could already buy cotton sheets in a dome shape so it would be seamless. And who said you have to remain standing? You can easily sit.
I think that if you combined this with binaural sound through headphones it would be very immersive. Like the mentioned ride at Disney World, called Soarin'.
We projected Space Invaders 360 on a hemispherical display at the ZKM Visitors’ Day in 2007 and the game is actually designed to run on it: http://www.toblux.de/blog/2007/10/25/space-invaders-360/
@ Prime,
Thank you for clarifying. I was outta the loop on that one!
Isn't it better if the dome was over the head? cockpit style total immersion