Curved Screen - Additional Thoughts

I am literally bending my mind around the idea of bending or curving my projector screen. If you look at how an image is projected it is actually pincushioned which means that if the screen is flat, it would be distorted slightly towards the sides of the screen. This is because the light has to travel further in order to reach the side of the screen in comparison to the middle.

I used Projector Calculator Pro to calculate throw distance and screen sizes, an excellent tool for saving time when playing with distances, zooming and different models of projectors.

The Sanyo PLV-Z5 projector is capable of displaying a 90" screen at a throw distance of 2.7 meters. It is also capable of lens-shifting the image so you can place the projector up to half of the height of the screen above the top end of the screen. By bending the screen making the distance 2.7 meters to all areas of the screen, and by placing the screen 1.5 meters in front of the driver position, my calculations (that may very well be wrong) tells me that I'll get a representation field of view of 70.3 degrees. The naked human eye has a field of view around 160 degrees, but most of the peripheral field can probably be disregarded here.

Below is an illustration of my ideas in a visual form (click to enlarge)

If I instead move the driver seat forward to 1 meter from the screen, the field of view increases to nearly 94 degrees - but I need to test how being so close to the screen will affect things such as image quality and motion sickness etc.

Live for Speed with with FOV set to 70 degrees (click to enlarge)

Live for Speed with with FOV set to 94 degrees (click to enlarge)

As you can see above, the image dimensions and proportions are the same in the two screenshots, but the second image with FOV at 94 degrees contains more visual information on the sides. I will soon post another note on the blog that discusses FOV and how it affects distortion, perception of speed and so forth. But now it is 4:43am so I'm signing off :)
Category: Other [cat_ot]