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Let me begin with a little rundown of this project. Intellidrive Interactive is planed to be a fully interactive demonstration of applications base don the IntelliDrive platform. The player will be seated in a custom-built chassis with three 46" LCD monitors, a 1000+W 5.1 surround system, steering wheel, pedals, the works!
We're using the UDK from Epic Games. The UDK is essentially the whole Unreal 3 engine minus the C++ code. This makes it absurdly powerful, but also absurdly complex. We are hoping to achieve a very high level of graphic fidelity combined with a very playable and engaging demonstration of IntelliDrive.
Our first step has been to determine the setup we'd like to place the players in. The team decided that a custom chassis based on the following design would be purchased:
(We're likely getting rid of the fames and adding support for 3 monitors.
THOMAS SHANNON
SENIOR DESIGN VISUALIZATION SPECIALIST
PB Project Visualization
http://www.pbprojectviz.com/
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The next test was to see how we could create 180 degrees of visibility. the first thing I did was to build a bit of a mockup in 3DS max. I pulled some models from our library and begun doing some testing.
The first thing I discovered was: You can't do 180 view with a single camera without using a spherical projection(Hard to do in a real-time engine as the math is difficult and can cause some shading issues). The reason is because as you approach the edges, everything becomes VERY distorted:
So, the solution is to use 3 cameras to create 3 views into the world - one for each monitor. Each camera needs its own computer to drive the graphics and the three will be tied together using a network connection:
THOMAS SHANNON
SENIOR DESIGN VISUALIZATION SPECIALIST
PB Project Visualization
http://www.pbprojectviz.com/
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Luckily, there's a game available for the Xbox 360 that allows this EXACT setup! So we just had to try it. We set up three 46" monitors, brought in 3 Xbox 360s and 3 copies of the game and set it all up to see if the multiple computer solution was truly viable.
IT IS AWESOME:
VIDEO:
Vimeo Video
(Currently uploading)
THOMAS SHANNON
SENIOR DESIGN VISUALIZATION SPECIALIST
PB Project Visualization
http://www.pbprojectviz.com/
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| We have begun some production work. Our mailbox model is second to NONE! 
THOMAS SHANNON
SENIOR DESIGN VISUALIZATION SPECIALIST
PB Project Visualization
http://www.pbprojectviz.com/
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Steve, we looked at several of those solutions, but they all have the planar projection distortion problem. You can actually see ti in the Dirt video, the images on the edges of the screen are severely distorted, so if you're sitting in a char and you turn to the side, it won't look like it would if you were in a car.
This is the same as the distortion you get in a regular camera. To get 180 view, you have to incur a lot of distortion based on your lens. Since your lens is essentially a curved projection, you end up with the "fish-eye" lens look.
So, the solution that Forza and our project will be using is to basically wrap the monitors around the player and provide what is essentially 3 windows into the world, limiting the distortion considerably as each camera is less than 45 degrees.
THOMAS SHANNON
SENIOR DESIGN VISUALIZATION SPECIALIST
PB Project Visualization
http://www.pbprojectviz.com/
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