fosley
Skyrim Rearview
An overview of a hypothetical surround gaming setup, created and rendered in Google Sketchup. The screens are each 10' x 10', and the ball in the center (representing a viewer's head) has a 1' diameter. In reality, as long as the nearest point on the wall is far enough to be comfortable, you could scale the screens up or down and the view would be the same -- a 6' x 6' setup positioned 3' from the viewer would probably be fine, and would be more likely to fit in a typical gaming room.
The perspective of the screenshot makes the sides and top look distorted, but if each screen was rendered at exactly 90° (both vertical and horizontal) using traditional rectilinear projection (this is how almost any game you can find renders the view), a viewer in the center of the room would observe a perfect, non-distorted image.
The floor is (badly aligned and) probably unnecessary, but I included it since I could. In most racing or flight simulators, the floor would just show useless bits of the cockpit anyways, and it would take a lot more effort to make panels you could walk on to get in and out of the rig. You could always put a plexi-glass or steel-mesh floor above the screen, but it's probably not worth the trouble.
The actual Sketchup model also has a rear panel that's currently invisible. If you put the rear screen on a sliding door mechanism, you probably could end up with a full-surround setup. However, for my purposes, I would just setup the top, left, center, and right screens and call it good.
Skyrim Rearview
An overview of a hypothetical surround gaming setup, created and rendered in Google Sketchup. The screens are each 10' x 10', and the ball in the center (representing a viewer's head) has a 1' diameter. In reality, as long as the nearest point on the wall is far enough to be comfortable, you could scale the screens up or down and the view would be the same -- a 6' x 6' setup positioned 3' from the viewer would probably be fine, and would be more likely to fit in a typical gaming room.
The perspective of the screenshot makes the sides and top look distorted, but if each screen was rendered at exactly 90° (both vertical and horizontal) using traditional rectilinear projection (this is how almost any game you can find renders the view), a viewer in the center of the room would observe a perfect, non-distorted image.
The floor is (badly aligned and) probably unnecessary, but I included it since I could. In most racing or flight simulators, the floor would just show useless bits of the cockpit anyways, and it would take a lot more effort to make panels you could walk on to get in and out of the rig. You could always put a plexi-glass or steel-mesh floor above the screen, but it's probably not worth the trouble.
The actual Sketchup model also has a rear panel that's currently invisible. If you put the rear screen on a sliding door mechanism, you probably could end up with a full-surround setup. However, for my purposes, I would just setup the top, left, center, and right screens and call it good.