A Personal Surround Environment: Projective Display with Correction for Display Surface Geometry and Extreme Lens Distortion

Abstract

Projectors equipped with wide-angle lenses can have an advantage over traditional projectors in creating immersive display environments since they can be placed very close to the display surface to reduce user shadowing issues while still producing large images. However, wide-angle projectors exhibit severe image distortion requiring the image generator to correctively pre-distort the output image.

In this paper, we describe a new technique based on Raskar�s two-pass rendering algorithm that is able to correct for both arbitrary display surface geometry and the extreme lens distortion caused by fisheye lenses. We further detail how the distortion correction algorithm can be implemented in a real-time shader program running on a commodity GPU to create low-cost, personal surround environments.

Results

(Download Video - 56MB)

(Left) Three-pass correction for display surface geometry and fisheye distortion. (Middle) Three-pass correction super-sampled 4x. (Right) Our two-pass method without super-sampling.

An immersive display built with a single fisheye projector.

Publications

T. Johnson, F. Gyarfas, R. Skarbez, H. Towles, H. Fuchs, "A Personal Surround Environment: Projective Display with Correction for Display Surface Geometry and Extreme Lens Distortion" Proceedings IEEE VR 2007, Charlotte, NC, Mar, 2007 (pdf | slides | video)