Most of this week I’ve been heads-down trying to finish a sample demonstrating the API that’s coming for the new Autodesk 360 viewer (of which we saw a sneak peek in this recent post), so today I don’t have much to talk about. The sample is pretty cool and involves my favourite car. But hopefully you’ll be able to see it in action before too long, so there’s really no need to say more about it, for now. :-)
A good portion of this blog’s readership is currently grilling meat and celebrating the 4th of July, so I won’t beat myself up too much about not having much to say. (For those of you still reading emails before celebrating, here’s a helpful article on taking photos of fireworks, even with your mobile phone.) Enjoy your long weekend, those of you who have one!
Something I came across, this morning, is the openFrameworks project and, specifically, the ofxPiMapper add-on. This interesting tool allows you to specify portions of an image to project onto surfaces, and handles all the coordinate system transformations.
It seems to be very handy for art installations, in particular. Here’s an example use of this technology, stressing the ability for it to run on a Raspberry Pi, which – while interesting – isn’t the most interesting piece about it, from my perspective:
This has me thinking about how it might be used to display a 3D model – which is then viewable from multiple angles – using a single projector. You could map content to surfaces on three connecting sides of a plain 3D cube, for instance, but that wouldn’t be especially compelling for the viewer. Which then had me thinking about whether you could project onto Plexiglas (as I did for a Halloween illusion a few years ago), to create more of a holographic effect. But I can’t see how that would work without multiple projectors (or at least some mirrors).
What I like most about this, ultimately, is that it’s actually a project about projecting model projections. :-) We’ll see if it ends up going anywhere, but that’s another question entirely, and one for another day.
