Multi Screen Environment with a Motion Base

Abstract

We put a motion base in a cubicle where three walls and the floor are video screens. The motion base works in two ways to enhance immersive feeling of the player. Firstly, it adds physical acceleration as most simulation rides do. Secondly, it reduces the discontinuity of an image on the multi screen system. Two planar screens placed at an angle generally have a problem that the image over the two screens does not look continuous at the seam of the screens unless the image is seen at one particular point where the perspective transformation was made. In the conventional systems, the position of the player’s head is tracked by sensors, then the image is rendered using the senced head position as the image viewpoint. Because of the inherent delay from the head motion to the appearance of the rendered image, the player is often distracted by the above discontinuity as well as by motion sickness. We introduce a method to anticipate the forecoming head motion which will be caused by the acceleration of the motion base. Then each image frame is rendered at the corresponding ideal viewpoint and displayed in a synchronized way with the base motion. This new control method substantially reduces the above problem when the player can change his/her head position only through driving operations for a vehicle.