We just posted a video of our sphere yesterday so I figured it might be a good idea to throw it into the showcase section, even if it’s not quite as polished as I’d like. The parts not including the projector and acrylic cost a couple of hundred dollars and we are planning on posting some documentation of the parts, process, and problems so that anyone interested can take advantage of our experience and hopefully show us up with something bigger and better. The tracker is CCV, the photo app is just slightly modified demo source, and the sound files for the final application are highjacked from bloom so we owe a big thanks to NUI Group. Any comments are very welcome.

Related:
http://nuigroup.com/forums/viewthread/3258/
http://nuigroup.com/forums/viewthread/2582/

awesome!
did you use a special lense for your projector to get a focused picture?

nope, standard projector going off a mirror with distortion corrected in quartz composer

Looks great guys… looking forward to seeing the documentation

Wow, that looks very nice! I stumbled across Microsoft’s “Sphere” project some weeks ago and it’s nice to see, that there’s already a DIY-solution out there. Keep on your good work!

Thanks for the positive feedback. We’re looking to figure out what sorts of applications we want to build for this now that we have the hardware going so I thought I’d throw out a brainstorming invitation. If anyone had any ideas or suggestions (criticisms welcome as well) of what they’d like to see us build for the sphere we’d love to hear them.

Great job!  When I get to a faster Internet connection, I’ll send you a few ideas I had that migh work for a sphere.

Like it like it!  Do you find that the pixels distort quite a lot without a fish eye lens on the pj?

yeah the pixels themselves do distort noticeably but we just distorted whatever we’re displaying to compensate. We’re not using a fisheye but by piping a live screen capture into a circle wrap distortion in quartz composer the actual application we’re trying to run displays without distortion, plus we didn’t have to pay for the fisheye lens.

how did you do it?

awesome! great work, guys!

this may not be the right thread, but u 2 jeraman must be applauded.
Great work mate

I wonder how you measure a screens dimension when dealing with spheres… anyone know?

lol, i’m not too sure. the diameter of the sphere is 36” which gives us a surface area (taking into account the cut off at the top and bottom) roughly equivalent to between a 90” to 100” 16:9 screen (don’t have the exact calculations on me). we just finished building a 98” llp (designed to have the same touchable area) that we plan on using to compare interaction techniques and task performance between the sphere and a flat screen.