At the 3:27 minute mark in the Nov. 2nd, 2007 episode of This Week @ NASA (link goes to the page not the video, which is linked on that page), you can see what for all intents and purposes looks to be a holographic CGI globe, showing weather patterns moving across the Earth. Now, I’m sure that it’s probably something very mundane, but damned if it doesn’t look just like something you’d see in Star Wars. I want one.
Sorry to disappoint but it’s likely just a giant white ball with projectors pointed at it :(.
Yes, I’m sure it is, but how is it done? Are the projectors inside? Are they located above? To the sides? What software are they using? Do they have to use a specialized software program to get the images on the sphere? Or can it be done with the software that comes with an ordinary PC?
Sorry, I can’t shed much light on how this specific NASA version of the globe is created. Just to say that similar things ca be found in many places. If you ever visit Honolulu (and why would anyone not want to?) you can visit the Bishop’s Museum, inside which there’s a planetarium. They have a large globe that displays data apparently culled from weather satellites and suchlike, and they claim a lot of the data is real-time, or at least very-recent real-time. You can tweak the controls and change what’s displayed. The displays range from Google-Earth style realistic depictions of the Earth’s surface to more abstract contour lines of data. The displays seem to cover the entire surface of the globe without any noticeable ‘joins’. I don’t know for sure how this is done. I do know it’s a strange and beautiful thing.
It’s apparently a Magic Planet. I’ve sent them an email asking them if they’ll make a consumer version (since I imagine the models they offer [which go up to six feet are probably pretty pricey). Hopefully, if enough people bug them they’ll at least consider it.
My company (an AV integrator) has done this for NOAA. What it takes is a digital processor from Silicon Optix. This box processes the video signal before it gets to the projector, and allows you to map the image you are projecting to any shape surface you can imagine. This way, you can project on a sphere, or a dome, or from crazy angles. Another application is in bars, with very little space to put a projector right in front of a screen. With this processor, you can put the projector off to one side, well out of the projector’s own horizontal keystone range, and still have the image appear correctly.
Mines Mystique
How do you keep it in focus on a curved surface?
The maker’s Web site is infuriatingly light on details about how the thing works, but clearly the projectors are inside, not outside. I can’t conceive of how it can be done with less than two projectors, unless they aren’t covering the entire sphere, and from all appearances they do. But I have a hard time seeing how they can get two projectors into a 16-inch sphere and illuminate its entire surface so evenly.
I know people at some of the places that have the thing. I’ll e-mail one or two and see if I can get more info.
It’s done with a fisheye lens right over the video projector lens. It works very nicely, although it can be a little tricky to get the image aligned on the sphere correctly the first time. The Magic Planet people have an 18" model I’ve seen several times.
Oh, and I haven’t yet looked at the NASA podcast in the OP, but if it’s called “Science on a Sphere” I’m pretty sure that one is done with several projectors shining on the outside of a sphere, and not from the inside like Magic Planet.
The one in Seattle’s Science Fiction Museum has 4 exterior projectors, IIRC. The white sphere is suspended from above and there are three projectors coplanar with the center of the ball, spaced 120 degrees apart. There’s a table display below the ball with the fourth projector, shooting up at the ‘south pole’ of the sphere.
It displays a lot of collages of SF movie stuff, which would be just as good on a flat screen. The coolest things it does are the Moon, Mars, and the Death Star, because only the sphere could do those so well.
There are four cameras projecting images on to the globe. They probably have special software to distort the edges so that they merge pretty cleanly. If you’re really tall like I am and get to close you can block the projection.
We go there a lot. They can also project Mars and the Moon.
It looks like you could use one for talking to the Dark Lord.
FOOL OF A TOOK 