SIR Computer Science Investigation Abstract
BUILDING A THREE-DIMENSIONAL, USER INTERACTION BASED ENVIRONMENT USING A DUAL PROJECTOR SYSTEM AND LIGHT POLARIZATION FILTERS
Presenter:
Brian Martin, Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy
Advisor:
Dr. Jason Leigh, University of Illinois at Chicago
Abstract:
The topic of my research is the three dimensional display of objects using the GeoWall, originally developed at the Electronic Visualization Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Chicago. The display requires two Digital Light Processors projectors, one responsible for each of the viewers eyes made possible by leveraging the power of polarized light. This is done by placing polarization filters over the lens of the projectors that correspond to either the right or the left eye of the glasses that the end-user is wearing, whose lenses are also polarized filters. Also required is a special polarization preserving projector screen commonly known as a “silver screen.”
The GeoWall was originally developed as a more effective and comprehensible channel for analyzing scientific data. Geologists took a special liking to this piece of technology and hence the name. For my research, instead of scientific data, I have coded several demos that scratch the surface of the GeoWall’s capabilities using Electro, an application development environment written by Robert Kooima and designed for use on cluster-driven tiled displays and desktop systems. The demos are written using the Lua programming language, and simulate a three dimensional, user interaction based environment.