[Bf-gamedev] Using the Blender Games Engine for immersive training in a 360 projection dome

[James Sheridan]

Hi All,

I've been doing some research into getting the Blender Game Engine 
working in one of our domes

  * www.igloovision.com
  * https://www.dropbox.com/s/k81iquleisiocsd/Igloo%20St%20Pauls%20Draft%203.mov?dl=0

Our domes use a cylindrical (or spherical....we just chop the top and 
bottom off) panoramic projection that is ideally 8000x1100 but anything 
above 6400x950 looks ok.   We do all of the image slicing, warping and 
edge blending in a custom app but need a way to get the image out of the 
BGE and into our app.    In unity we use 5 cameras oriented around the y 
axis each with a fisheye effect to approximate a cylindrical camera - we 
then use syphon <http://syphon.v002.info/> under osx and spout 
<http://spout.zeal.co/> under windows to output these camera textures to 
our warping and edge blending app.   Where looking to do a research 
project with Loughborough University and where we build an immersive 
training scenario in the dome and we're after some help advice with this.

As Syphon and Spout are both open source and widely used adding in 
support for them would mean not only support for our (and others) domes 
but also a wide range of other tool and uses like VJing, museum 
installations etc and is something others have already been asking for

 1. http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?345832-Syphon-support-in-the-game-engine
 2. http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?298055-Live-Real-Time-Output-of-Animation
 3. http://pyppet.blogspot.co.uk/2012/01/pyppet2-audio-analysis.html

In this regards to getting syphon and/or spout added into the BGE we 
were wondering

 1. Where in the codebase should I start looking to share the render
    texture produced by the spherical dome render via syphon and/or spout?
 2. Would anyone (preferably one of the BGE module owners) be able to
    provide timely support for this project for a small consulting fee?
 3. Would anyone be available to do this work and do you have a ball
    park figure for what it would cost?
 4. Does anyone have any feelings about what the performance differences
    might be for a large (100,000+ vertex) textured model between the
    spherical panoramic renderer and the approach we have done with
    unity which is just 5 normal renders oriented?

Regards James
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