180-degree VR projector funded on Kickstarter
Bring friends and family into your virtual reality game world with the 180 degree Immersis projector
Virtual reality could soon be coming to your entire living room, as Immersis’ 180-degree VR projector has just reached its Kickstarter goal of $100,000. Rather than confine VR to a cut-off world inside a headset like the Samsung Gear VR, Immersis aims to transform the space around you into a more immersive, social experience that you can share with friends and family.
“Until now, VR was limited to artificial formats,” says Immersis’ CEO and co-founder Daniel Duhautbout in the company’s KickStarter video. “It was about immersing your mind into the format of a TV screen or into a lonely and artificial journey of head mounted displays. But it demonstrated that gamers would love to get more immersion.”
The projector is a joint-venture between French and American designers and uses a new technology developed by Catopsys that can project a real-time adaptation of the image to the shape and size of the room you’re in, allowing it to map the 3D position of each projected pixel. You don’t necessarily need a TV either, as it only needs to be connected to your PC via a single HDMI or DVI port to start projecting.
Once it’s connected to your computer and has been configured to the size and shape of your room, Immersis can project 3D games and panoramic photos and videos in 180 degrees using its fisheye lens. 2D content, on the other hand, will be projected as a flat image. The projector’s native resolution will be 1,920×1,080 and its LED lamp will have a brightness of 3,000 lumens which should last around 50,000 hours. You’ll also be able to integrate a TV, monitor or tablet into the projection as well, and use your existing game pad or keyboard and mouse control systems.
At the moment, Immersis will support any kind of game developed with a real-time 3D engine and the company has already developed a plug-in for Unity 3D. A beta version for the Unreal Engine and a universal plug-in are also available. Immersis will support all types of panoramic photo formats as well and is compatible with Google Photospheres.
The first version of Immersis will start shipping to Kickstarter backers – all 221 of them – from the end of this year. Catopsys will continue working on the projector, though, so it can start preparing the final version for an as yet undisclosed date.