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February 20, 2008 6:24 PM   Subscribe

Ever wish you had eyes in the back of your head?
posted by kaibutsu (12 comments total) 3 users marked this as a favorite
 
No, but I often wished my mother didn't.
posted by mr_crash_davis at 6:50 PM on February 20, 2008


Very cool. I wonder if anyone prints 360o photographs on spheres; like the world turned inside out.
posted by Anything at 7:40 PM on February 20, 2008


And I've never seen a panoramic animation before, like the .gif in the second link. Seems to somehow make it easier to 'get' a 360o view better than from a still.
posted by Anything at 7:43 PM on February 20, 2008


When we have heads up displays on contacts, giving yourself 360 degree vision is going to be interesting. They say the mind adapts to things like flipping the visual input upside down, so I wonder how much adaptation to 360 degree vision would happen.
posted by TheOnlyCoolTim at 7:59 PM on February 20, 2008


By the way, could this cylindrical 360o thing be done optically?
posted by Anything at 8:06 PM on February 20, 2008


I see what you did there. No, really.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 9:36 PM on February 20, 2008


So the method in the first couple links involves spherical and hyperbolic mirrors, and then reprojecting onto a cylinder, which is then cut and laid flat. (Obligatory Escher drawing) It's all done 'optically,' by pointing a standard camera at a mirror of a particular shape. They're using this with a mind towards computer vision; it makes for a (presumably) cheaper method to build a panoramic camera by requiring just a specially shaped mirror instead of heavily modified cameras, for example.

I guess for human use, I could imagine a mirror hanging above your head and some kind of parascope pointing up at the mirror, but it seems kinda impractical.

It's definitely something you can adapt to, and pretty quickly at that. If you run your favorite quake engine and type 'fov 120' in the console, you'll get a wider-than-normal field of vision, which you can adapt to very well. (It's considered cheating in gaming circles, from what I understand.) The last link contains a couple 'cleaner' plugins for Quake so you can play around with this yourself, and see what the effect on your brain is.

Helmholtz apparently made some sphere lenses to look at the world through, and said he adapted to the experience quite well. It's supposed to cause the world to look hyperbolic instead of Euclidean...
posted by kaibutsu at 9:36 PM on February 20, 2008


Ever wish you could get head in the back of your eyes?
posted by Curry at 10:00 PM on February 20, 2008


That shit was awesome. But then, I'm a math geek.
posted by number9dream at 10:19 PM on February 20, 2008


I have. And I've also wished that I could talk like Kurtis Blow, but that's neither here nor there.
posted by snwod at 10:25 PM on February 20, 2008 [1 favorite]


And now I've learned that it's possible to animate the little favicon in FireFox. Blink tag 2.0!
posted by rouftop at 9:54 AM on February 21, 2008


kaibutsu: Somebody actually made a quake client that does a true fisheye projection of FOV. It is much more accurate than the stretching done by the original client.
posted by hellphish at 1:09 PM on February 21, 2008


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