Immersive Gaming in a Hemispherical Dome Case study: Blender Game Engine

Abstract

In the following we will discuss a cost effective
immersive gaming environment and the implementation in
Blender [1], an open source game engine. This extends traditional
approaches to immersive gaming which tend to concentrate
on multiple flat screens, sometimes surrounding the player, or
cylindrical [2] displays. In the former there are unnatural gaps
between each display due to screen framing, in both cases they
rarely cover the 180 horizontal degree field of view and are
even less likely to cover the vertical field of view required to
fully engage the field of view of the human visual system. The
solution introduced here concentrates on seamless hemispherical
displays, planetariums in general and the iDome [3] as a specific
case study. The methodology discussed is equally appropriate
to other realtime 3D environments that are available in source
code form or have a suitably powerful means of modifying the
rendering pipeline.