SurroundVision
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MIT Media Lab's Surround Vision brings virtual reality to a tablet (video)
Sure, 3D adds a little more dimensionality to your couch-bound viewing experience, but it's far from the truly immersive virtual reality people have promising for decades. Surround Vision isn't quite VR either, but it's an interesting way of breaking the perception barrier, allowing a viewer to pan around a scene outside the perspective offered by one display. It's a project by Santiago Alfaro, graduate student at MIT's Media Lab, and relies on a tablet with a compass. In his demo he filmed video from three perspectives and is able to display the center perspective on the main TV while panning around to the other two with the tablet. It's an interesting idea to bring some aspect of interactivity to the viewing process, but we could see Hollywood turning it into the next big gimmick, with the leading man pointing off screen dramatically and saying "Oh my god, what's that?" before waiting patiently for a few seconds while the audience scrambles to pan around and find the horror. Yeah, we've got your number, Michael Bay. Immersive video demonstration after the break for you to lose yourself in.
Fraunhofer's Surround Vision lets projectors get curvy
Those prolific folks at the Fraunhofer Institute recently took the wraps off yet another invention of theirs, this one promising to let projectors do things they've never done before (or at least let 'em do it more easily). More specifically, its "Surround Vision" software will automatically calibrate projectors to allow for images to be projected on surfaces of any shape with "pixel-precise accuracy". What's more, according to Gizmag, the system can apparently be used "in principle" with any type of projector. While it seems unlikely that many folks will be reworking their home theaters to take advantage of the system, the Fraunhofer folk see no shortage of other applications for the technology, including trade show booths, theme parks, simulators, and planitariums, to name a few.
