An affordable surround‐screen virtual reality display
Carolina Cruz‐Neira, Dirk Reiners, Jan P. Springer · Journal of the Society for Information Display · 2010
Abstract— Building a projection‐based virtual reality display is a time‐, cost‐, and resource‐intensive enterprise, and many details contribute to the final display quality. This is especially true for surround‐ screen displays where most of them are one‐of‐a‐kind systems or custom‐made installations with specialized projectors, framing, and projection screens. In general, the costs of acquiring these types of systems have been in the hundreds and even millions of dollars, specifically for those supporting synchronized stereoscopic projection across multiple screens. Furthermore, the maintenance of such systems adds an additional recurrent cost, which makes them hard to afford for general introduction in a wider range of industry, academic, and research communities. A low‐cost easy‐to‐maintain surround‐screen design based on off‐the‐shelf affordable components for the projection screens, framing, and display systems is presented. The resulting system quality is comparableto significantly more expensive commercially available solutions. Additionally, users with average knowledge can implement this design, and it has the added advantage that single components can be individually upgraded based on necessity as well as available funds.