A startup wants to fill your house with projection-mapped effects, which are the cooolest thing ever

Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2017/04/06/themepunks-the-home-game.html

So Hiro Protagonist’s ridiculous VR goggles that require an external laser projector to track his movement and paint them from the outside instead of just displaying stuff directly, could finally become a real thing.

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Can someone explain the process of taking away light via a projection? In the photo illustrating the story, the map of San Francisco on the wall is presumably all projected. Certainly the shadow on the map, hard and with a source to the left, does not match the shadows from the plant leaves the are soft and lit above and to the right.

My question, then, is what creates the darkness that gives them the dark shadows in the projected area? I understand perceived values, but since the room appears to have some degree of natural light, I don’t see how the dark areas could be the base ambient level of light falling on the wall. As I understand things, projectors only add light, not take it away, so what am I missing? Am I still thinking 20th century?

this looks cool. I’ve always wished that somehow the album art from my ipod could be beamed to the wall in a large image

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I think the map is a physical object and the hard shadow lines you’re seeing are actually the physical depth of the object. There is a soft shadow, with a source above and to your right, at the lower-right of the map.

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From TFA…

I believe that the projector is creating an image of a kitten waking up…

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At last, a new medium for porn. Now the economy can take off again!

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If we retrain coal miners to work in the new projection mapping porn
economy, perhaps we can keep our clean air?

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I’m not sure, but I think you have to audition.

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I would definitely love such a device!

But I predict that this summer we will at most see a working prototype in a very well-controlled environment with pre-set projections custom-built for some hand-picked objects in that environment.
I’m not questioning if they can model the room. After all, the system uses geometric patterns projected on the environment + a camera to create a digital 3D model of the environment. All of that is ‘old tech’.

The way I see it, the real challenge will be customising the actual projections to be meaningful in the perceived environment. After all, not everybody has a map of the city pasted to the wall for the device to project an itinerary on. Or even if you have a map, will the device recognise it as such? And recognise the city? Most lkely not.
So unless you also buy some standardised props for these cool projections to work on, remind yourself that you’ll most likely be limited to some default pattern-projections on a vase or table. Maybe a picture and/or a text on a blank spot of a wall.
Related to that: what resolution would this thing have? Even a 4K projection smeared out over a room will have reasonably big pixels… Maybe too big to actually use for text?

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I think these are going to have the same problem projectors always have: room too bright and not enough candlepower in the projection. Now if the room is a bit dimly lit, then you could have the thing project all kinds of amazing things and the color gamut could be pretty good, but the room would have to be almost pitch black. And the walls painted with the silver screen stuff the make movie theater screens out of.

At least Magic Leap and the MS Hololens can actually block light (iirc) so making dark things isn’t unpossible. But then you have to wear a goofy headset.

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Start at 2:10…for the Jack Sparrow transformation at Shanghai Disney.

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This with synchronized mini drones would be awesome.

those coal miners are so dirty…teeheehee

This is one of my favorite demos:

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