360 degree projectors

[PEO]

Morning all

 

well this caught me by suprise. My boss has asked me what I know about 360 degree projectors I had no idea that you can get these.

 

Has anyone seen these; using them in the school; and what would you use it for?

 

Cheers

 

Kev

[danrhodes]

Morning all

 

well this caught me by suprise. My boss has asked me what I know about 360 degree projectors I had no idea that you can get these.

 

Has anyone seen these; using them in the school; and what would you use it for?

 

Cheers

 

Kev

 

They sound fun, i've seen 3D projectors before in a CLC they are fun also!

[enjay]

Looks very cool and gimmicky - struggling for an educational use, though!

[PEO]

My boss thinks we can project learning walls on to the wall. basically go digital.

 

Im strugling to find them on the net

[dhicks]

My boss thinks we can project learning walls on to the wall.

 

What's a "learning wall"? A 360-degree projector implies a 360-degree wall, and most classrooms are rectangular (cue comment from someone who teaches in a converted lighthouse...). I imagine you could make a 360-degree projector easily enough in the reverse of the way you do a 360-degree camera: with a convex lense mounted above a projector. The image resolution is probably going to be pretty poor (1280 X 768, but spread out over a much wider area than normal, and you're bound to loose some at the edges) and you might struggle to find software that knows how to adjust to fit a 360-degree display.

 

Is your boss actually thinking of a display made up from multiple projected displays, so like multiple monitors but without bezels getting in the way, stretching around two or three walls of a classroom? That strikes me as a good idea, and very do-able right now: either buy a bunch of cheaper projectors right now for around £400 each, or wait a few months until the snazzy new smaller, cheaper LED-based projectors are commonplace. There's no need to worry too much about the lumens rating of these projectors, think of them as snazzy monitors for pupil use, not front-of-class displays.

 

We've had a couple of other threads recently about controlling such a setup. You could either simply buy one "gaming" PC with multiple graphics cards and spread your desktop over the displays in the traditional way, or use something like an NComputing / Windows MultiPoint Server system to let you plug a separate keyboard and mouse in for each display and let multiple users operate at the same time. My preference would be for next month's release of Ubuntu, complete with multi-pointer support, letting you have multiple mouse pointers doing different things on a large desktop spread over, say, 6 projected displays.

 

--

David Hicks