11 Tech Tuesday – Projection Mapping

Posted: April 3rd, 2012 ˑ Filled under: Augmented Reality, Tech Tuesday ˑ No Comments

Architectural projection mapping is the latest passing fad.. or is it.

For the last couple of years we have seen buildings and other physical spaces projection mapped for art, advertising, performance, etc. Architectural Projection mapping is where media is projected on a three dimensional surface and the warping that would occur is corrected for. Projection mapping tends to play with the actual architecture letting it do things that it can’t and telling stories across its surface. Usually these look much better in recorded video than in real life because our eyes are better at dynamic range and therefor there is much better contrast in video.

There are a number of tools which people use to create projection mapping:

Touch Designer is a pretty powerful visual programming environment that does very high resolution media and deals with edge blending. There is a free version to play with and it supports a certain amount of interactivity.

Traditional digital signage a display playback systems like Dataton Watchout, and Pandora Coolux support it.

Some VJ tools are starting to support projection mapping like Arkaos or this custom set of tools by Miguel Espada

There are a number of 3D scanning and projection mapping combined systems like Mapamok, here is some work with a kinnect and 3d projection

Keep your eye on Mocap.. lets see what they bring

There are many more and I will keep updating.

Check out the examples of projection mapping below

A chapel turned into a musical instrument