Earlier on this year, I covered the benefits of widescreen vs pan and scan gaming. The most interesting thing about widescreen gaming is the field of view it provides. This guy, John Nilsson, is trying to take that field of view one step further wit the use of larger resolutions projected onto a dome. jDome is his new invention which has been patented but is till in prototype stage. Although this guy doesn’t make a great video presenter I do find the product, the jDome, to be kinda interesting, although it may be more of a novelty than a practical application. The room required to set this up is a lot more than most people would have available in their average lounge room or study.
The idea is fairly simple. If you’ve ever stood behind a projector screen you would have noticed that the image shines through the screen and is mirrored on the other side. If your projector has the ability to mirror the image, kind of like a rear projection TV, then you’re able to project onto a dome type screen, sit inside and have the game displayed around you. There are a couple of downfalls I can see – without proper ingame support, things like the HUD (heads up display) will be oddly positioned in the bottom section. Obviously, games like World of Warcraft, which he mentions on the site, are not cut out for jDome, since they are not from the 1st person point of view. FPS games on the other hand are.
I suppose a better idea might be to make a semi-circle display, or even a curved rectangle. But a complete dome falls short due to the bottom never being displayed correctly in games. Even if you consider flight sims, the cockpit instruments would be skewed when projected at the bottom of the dome. And also, to get the proper positioning, the cockpit controls would be under where you’re keyboard’s meant to be, if you go by the positioning he uses in his demo video.
I have a feeling this is vapourware – but it’s interesting to see none the less.