Pepper's Cone: An Inexpensive Do-It-Yourself 3D Display

Pepper's Cone: An Inexpensive Do-It-Yourself 3D Display
Xuan Luo, Jason Lawrence, Steven M. Seitz
UIST '17: ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology
Session: Displays
Abstract
This paper describes a simple 3D display that can be built from a tablet computer and a plastic sheet folded into a cone. This display allows naturally viewing a three-dimensional object from any direction over a 360-degree path of travel without the use of a head mount or special glasses. Inspired by the classic Pepper's Ghost illusion, our approach uses a curved transparent surface to reflect the image displayed on a 2D display. By properly pre-distorting the displayed image our system can produce a perspective-correct image to the viewer that appears to be suspended inside the reflector. We use the gyroscope integrated into modern tablet computers to adjust the rendered image based on the relative orientation of the viewer. The end result is a natural and intuitive interface for inspecting a 3D object. Our choice of a cone reflector is obtained by analyzing optical performance and stereo-compatibility over rotationally-symmetric conic reflector shapes. We also present the prototypes we built and measure the performance of our display through side-by-side comparisons with reference images.
DOI:: doi.org/10.114...
WEB: uist.acm.org/u...
Recorded at the ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology, Quebec City, Canada October 22-25, 2017

[@madshobye]

Amazing work and presentation. Thank you.

[@mitchdeeTV]

Amazing work! This is so interesting!

[@igorgiuseppe1862]

15:12 i saw this before o.O or something very similiar when i was looking for compiz videos

[@rueric1]

Can anyone tell me where I can find pre-made sample videos for Pepper's Cone for iPad? Thank you!

[@frankcohen3514]

Thanks for the great idea and presentation! Have you considered projecting into a sphere? Or maybe using 2 reflectors and 2 iPads? -Frank

[@basswhlf2321]

Thank you so much for this! :)

[@ShireIO]

Interesting presentation (even if it was 4 years ago) however this cone only allows observation from a single angle - the front. It seems as though this removes the advantage associated with the pyramid display (which can be viewed from many angles and therefore many people). Would not a simple pepper's ghost display, with a square angled reflector, be superior? It offers a much larger display area, no requirement for distorting the image to make it appear correctly, and rather than rotating the cone you would simply rotate the image displayed to achieve the same effect.

[@stefansoder6903]

I was thinking the same! Or have we missed something? This seems like a very good student project but with little real practicability.

[@hanelyp1]

Other than the admittedly cool midair image, how is this better in practical use than just viewing a screen?

[@sgalien6661]

This is truly fantastic, but how to distort the image, video and 3d model?

[@bmob1987]

I wrote my own 3d engine and implement my own technic that i developed to show a cube as a primitive model where you can see the four edges so it appears to you a full 360° model that you can see in all perspectives by only change your viewpoint

[@picklenickil]

@@bmob1987 oh wow ..? Any papers or work we can see.. would love to learn

[@News.30second]

its great tell me the dimension i want to make it for my baby and can u work on a player like any video play on it like we can c cricket match on it plzzz make great feature and things and share me to

[@wassimmroueh4242]

i have a question.... all reflection cover a 180 degree view right? assuming we have a 3d image of a human body this technique without rotation will cover half the body in a 180 degree view right?

[@maadcity9791]

Hello, Im tried to re-create the image but I am having a hard to distorting the image. Can I email you?

[@sigchi]

Hi MAAD City, This is a research project. You can check out the publication by the authors for more information: doi.org/10.1145/3126594.3126602 //DL

[@raygunmin]

oh..good!

[@josuetorres7423]

Hi!!! Excellent work, can you please make any reference to your paper or github link so I could do a research on this? I'm very interested on the fact of the distorted image and how you process new images.

[@sigchi]

Hi Josué Torres. The link to the paper is in the end of the video description: dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=3126594.3126602 //DL

[@hugeuglygorillaz9599]

I'm trying to figure out the distortion of the image if the angle is more than 45 degrees (glass). Say 70 degrees. It makes the image seem to tip backwards. I've tried 20 degrees (10 degree increase on both sides of the top of the image) that seems to work but I can't find the math for it

[@bmob1987]

Its fake

[@picklenickil]

Nope.. We have it.. at OSC Ålesund

[@hanelyp1]

Not exactly fake, just limited to a single viewpoin, and the image still flat. Which makes it much less impressive.

[@christophdunkel5733]

I like the pragmatic "hands on" approach. A very understandable in depth presentation. Great job, Mrs. Luo

[@周衡-g7y]

这个后续有什么新的发展吗

[@antonioalaia6579]

I'm interested to pepper's ghost tecnich. to use cone che i usa a device that is not mac family? How to distort video in order to rebuild it by cone? Or can apply a simple 3d video and apply a cone.

[@fifthrider]

An interesting discussion, but I'm not a programmer. I just want to download/install/use some program to distort an animation so that I can display it in a cone. How? This video talks about how it works, but not where I can go to make it happen for me. Has anyone made some end-user friendly software that can be downloaded and used to do this?

[@AustinWollitzBodyElectric]

I create the 4 plane pepper's "pyramid' with my middle school students. Great projects. However I have always struggled with the cone. Now I understand why. Very cool work.

[@superwonderfool11]

this presentation was so well presented i was intrigued and understood your work and what you're trying to do!

[@HarryUnderwoodMedia]

Hi, a question: can this also be used on a life-size scale for projecting, say, a person (or persons) onto a stage with a 3D camera so that the audience can see the person from all angles?

[@jvukovic4]

I would assume so, even in the 1900's they had achieved it at one angle,nso along with the head tracking and flipping the screen so that the cone faces downard, you could do crazy things

[@picklenickil]

Look up OSC - Offshore simulator Center at Ålesund Norway. Maybe our simulators may interest u

[@Lumibear.]

Oooh, this and a couple of laser projectors top and bottom and pow, finally a convincing looking full colour hologram display. Disney World get on it! ;)

[@ericblenner-hassett3945]

There may be a way to add external camera face tracking. The simplest I can think of is based on ESP32 Camera modules with a single motor driver and HALL sensor. The sensor lets the ESP32 know when the camera is " centered " or at 0 degrees, a geared system using a micro motor for rotating the camera and sending the data to the display for face tracking in order to change where on the display the image is and its' rotation from the face perspective. The ESP32 for cost and that it is available with camera modules, can do face tracking with open source software and can drive the ULN2003 for forward or reverse of single motors with separate motor power cheaply. Depending how and where to add the camera, the software can ' cheat ' by having the camera located at a fixed location from the display. I hope this helps.

[@pawelschmidt7201]

Where can I actually find the code? I am asking myself how much the original picture on the Ipad has to be distorted in order to get a clean 3D image? Is the degree of distortion linked to the size of the display?

[@igorgiuseppe1862]

great job!

[@andreaparisi6811]

Very very very good job!!

[@holographicmagic5370]

How do I contact you?

[@kajvtoet]

This is fun but the real solution is to distort a cubemap. Instead of looking inside out, you'll look outside in. I've done this and it works fine. You can also use a dome sphere from a lens; the distortion is just different and so is the viewing angle..

[@kajvtoet]

With a cubemap you can use 3d vectors in GLSL. Good luck!

[@mohankumars6811]

Great Job

[@ignacioguinazu3812]

Thank you!!!

[@vietanhao1312]

So awesome

[@sakcee]

awesome experiment!