garageCube

[Lumenarius]

Long time user, big time fan, finally getting into camera based calibration for projection mapping projects.

Have you ever mapped a curved surface like a dome by hand with more than 1 projector? It's very difficult, time consuming, and often yields less than desirable results as there is not sharp geometry to map to and getting the blends perfect is virtually impossible.

This became evident over the last year as we have done many domes.

The solution? Use a special camera and special software. There are many solutions and they all work similarly where each projector alternates displaying some pattern of dots and lines and the camera then sees these and solves for where everything is.

When it works right it goes from not really even possible to a perfect map in 15 minutes or less. It's straight up magic.

The problem with this? The software available on the market is either ancient and terrible to use and/or unbelievably expensive.

There are a few free tools but they really don't even work. We tried.

The ones that do. Well, let me explain my experience.

VIOSO 6. We used this for a dome and it did work. However, the license was about $15,000 for up to 8 HD projectors. Yes, you read that right. The software is very very poorly documented with virtually every guide and tutorial being so out of date it was useless. After working through all the various check boxes and drop downs we finally got it working. However, there is no Syphon/Spout in (even though their sales team said there was...), only NDI, which means there is a huge bottle neck if you want to use Resolume to pipe in content. 4K wouldn't even play at 15 FPS on a modern PC. It's also Windows only. You can use your own hardware which is good. The playback option it ships with doesn't work either. Like won't even load. You can do flat walls, domes, and *maybe* other geometry.

Screenberry. Honestly this is the best solution right now. It is actually up to date, works with Mac and PC, can do Syphon/Spout in and NDI in, however it's even more expensive clocking in around $20,000 for 8 HD projectors. You can use your own hardware which is huge. You can do any geometry as well.

Disguise is probably the best solution in the world. You can do all of the above but the issue is that is costs about $40,000 for 4 HD outputs. Yes, you also read that right. This is also a "their hardware only" kind of thing and you need to use their playback solution which actually works great. You can use multiple cameras, any geometry, and they have expert help ready. If you've ever seen a touring massive stage doing projections they are using this solution.

So what about MadMapper? Of course there is a calibration tool for single camera single projector use but that's not really the same thing we are talking about here.

This wish or feature request would be for a full blown calibration solution that could use a specific camera or, more desirably, any camera.

This wish would also encompass any number of projectors, on PC and Mac, at any resolution, with hopefully any geometry - though domes is probably the most obvious and helpful use case at first.

It would auto calibrate, auto blend, and would have a very simple process for choosing the geometry you are mapping to - domes, walls, a building with custom geo, etc.

Another huge feature would be to be able to adjust the calibration map afterwards. Sometimes things get bumped and a slight adjustment is better than doing it all over again as you often hide the camera after setup, etc.

One last huge feature would be to "equalize" the grey hazy boxes when you use a 3LCD projector blend. If you do stars for a planetarium the problem is most non-DLP projectors can't display actual black and so you get these kind of grey boxes for every output even though your content is black. Resolume has a hallways solution for this in Arena where you can increase the black levels to achieve a better result.

I think this is a specific use case and should be an add-on like the laser solution (which is better than every laser solution in the world. For real).

The MadMapper team crushes it at the UI/UX, and has delivered really good production level solutions for mapping for years. We love MadMapper. Everything above is totally possible from a software standpoint.

This item, the camera based calibration, would be worth many $1,000's of dollars. I mean did you see the prices above? Their margin is your opportunity.

I know MM6 is still in the works but this would be the biggest and most useful thing we could possibly imagine adding to MadMapper, other than the timeline - which is so awesome.

Hopefully with recent advances in AI it would not be as hard as it would have been 5 years ago.

Anyways, that would be the dream.

Please please MM team, can you fulfill this wish?

Thank you!