Back when I was in Seattle, I got an email from Hrvoje Benko that the project he’s been working on got released and blogging about it got an OK. Other than a tiny Twitter message I haven’t really had the chance yet to pay the attention to it the way the project deserves, so I decided to make a blogpost about it. Meet SPHERE, an interactive spherical display prototype that uses custom optics hardware as well as computer vision and graphics software to enable interaction on a spherical surface. This prototype device builds on a commercially available globe projection system (Global Imagination’s Magic Planet).
The team added touch-sensing capabilities with an infrared camera that shares the optical path with the projector. This novel configuration permits to enclose both the projection and the sensing mechanism in the base of the device and allows for easy 360 degrees access to the device and high degree of interactivity without shadowing or occlusion problems. A custom graphics projection pipeline that solves the distortion problems and enables projected data to be correctly visualized on the curved surface has also been developed.
