a friend comes to me and asks – how can i project a video onto a big dome?

he has an animation studio – and his animators have made an imax dome movie. but they have no imax dome to view it on. but he wants them to be able to experience their work in the true dome environment. welcome to second life.

well, a prim can only be 10m across. which is much too small for a whole audience. you could construct a dome out of many prims… but then you’d need to get the texturing just right. HEY! this sounds like a familiar problem.

and it’s solved just like before, but this time we carefully taper the rectangles so they form a semisphere. since the audience can see cracks between the rectangles, you want to apply the texture to each of the sides (and get the texture coordinates right so that they all blend together.)

code is available here – and of course you’ll need the qLab library as well. enjoy.

PS. in building the dome, i discovered a nasty bug in the SL client. when rectangles are tapered into parallelograms, their texture space gets squished all nasty. note to the Lindens: when cutting a parallelogram, you want to add an extra vertex to the midpoint of the base, forming three triangles, not two. this gives you a symmetrical texture space.

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Filed under: second life - @ 25 July 2006 3:23 pm