[Bf-committers] CAVE like extension for Blender Game Engine

[Dalai Felinto]

Hello.

I've never seen a CAVE, so I'm not sure about technical details on that one.

On my side, I've been working in extending Blender Game Engine to runs
in Domes. A few notes about that:

- there is no stereoscopic mode currently supported. Horizontal domes
need to handle eyes switching when looking at the zenith in a very
tricky way (therefore not implemented). It may be tackled next year
though.

- if you can find/read the code (highly commented) in
/source/gameengine/Ketsji/KX_Dome.cpp. It can help you if you want to
try to implement it in code level.

- if you don't need stereoscopic you can try to use the "Warp Data
Mesh" option to remap the panoramic spherical to your CAVE -
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Dev:Source/GameEngine/Fisheye_Dome_Camera
(in the end of the document).
[I'm replacing the truncated mode to an envmap mode. It can work
nicely for you too].

- Some Dome installations use another software to remap the input
(from one single computer) to several projectors. (you can spot that
in the middle of this video: http://www.vimeo.com/3170858 ). There way
you wouldn't need several machines. Not sure what would be better for
you (these softwares usually are really expensive).

** - I wouldn't be surprised if you can make it work without coding in
Blender source though. You will probably need a lot of python and
external applications (to handle tracking for example).

Cheers,
Dalai

http://blenderecia.orgfree.com

2009/4/22 Vilem Novak <pildanovak at post.cz>:
> Hello,
> I just wan't to mention there was a "Blender Sprint" which was a workshop for several people to get Blender running on CAVE in Innsbruck, there were coders and artists together, after the model of Blender Institute open projects. The original idea came from Samo Koresac, who also organized everything. The time was very short - only 3 days. The target was to get a simple walkthrough with some models of historical buildings in Innsbruck. We had 2 ways of running Server - client connection,  Jiri Hnidek made a Verse based connection, and I did a very simple python UDP connection. Our setup was very simple, we sinced only an avater in the walkthrough and playback of baked animations. There was a server, which took controller input and streamed the object positions to the hosts.
>
> Here's the official video(the webpage isn't there anymore):
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mHCes6bDBLQ
>
> If there's interest, I'll try to find the old files and upload them for viewing, there was a zoomable camera setup which was able to keep the projections connected, and more little goodies.
>
> Another thing is that a month ago I met a guy who works on CAVE in Prague. He is a grad student on the Institute of intermedia, however I forgot his name.
> Here are contacts to all the people in the institute : http://www.iim.cz/?id=3&lang=0    (the pages are in czech)
> The guy spoke about planning to do basically the same - to run CAVE with Blender engine. He was interested on going a way where a big server/cluster would be able to run heavy physic simulations or any other heavy computations BUT without running the graphical part, and stream the results to a cluster of computers which would only display the results in the engine. If I got him right, his research focus is on streaming huge amounts of data. I guess this target is the same problem, just in another scale. The institute is generally open to a wider experimentation, so feel free to write them.
> Cheers,
> Vilem Novak
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