Exploring the Elumens Vision Station's functionality and how it reshapes visual technology.

Computer displays have lagged behind other technological advances. While processors have exponentially increased in speed since 1982, displays remain unchanged, still limited to small rectangular glass screens without significant innovation.

In this edition of Mytour, we explore a groundbreaking display technology by Elumens that revolutionizes how digital environments are experienced. From space design to simulation in various fields like flight, driving, and battlefield, this new technology redefines user interaction.

VisionStation Display

The limitations of traditional displays are particularly evident during gaming. How many times have you entered a room only to be attacked from an unexpected direction? A typical monitor restricts your field of view to a small, flat rectangle, representing only what's directly ahead. This gives you a view of at most 50 degrees, similar to looking through a small porthole. Anything above, below, or to the side remains unseen unless you manually adjust your view with a controller, a motion that feels unnatural. In the real world, you instinctively turn your head or move your eyes quickly to look in a different direction.

In the real world, your peripheral vision helps you detect movement around you, quickly alerting you to look toward it. However, with a computer monitor, your peripheral vision is often distracted by the physical environment around you, instead of enhancing your immersion in the digital world you are engaging with.

Elumens, a company based in North Carolina, has developed a display system that accounts for peripheral vision. The VisionStation features a large, curved surface, akin to a satellite dish, along with a high-resolution data projector and a wide-angle projection lens to provide an immersive experience.

The result is a display offering an expansive 180-degree field of view, fully encompassing your visual field, including peripheral vision. An Elumens display surrounds you with the scene, showing not only what's in front but also what's to the sides, above, and below. In a driving simulator, for example, turning your head allows you to view both side windows just as you would in a real car.

Watching an Elumens display offers a highly immersive experience. The use of peripheral vision makes motion feel incredibly realistic, and turning your head to view objects feels completely natural. The screen's smooth surface eliminates any distractions, enhancing the overall experience.

The Vision series includes several models, from the VisionStation for individual use to the larger VisionDome VS-5, which can accommodate up to 45 people.

The VisionStation offers several key benefits:

The Vision Series projectors are equipped with an LCD projector offering resolutions between 1027x768 and 1365x1024, with 24-bit color (16.8 million colors). They support various modes including SXGA, UXGA, VGA, SVGA, and XGA, and feature HD15, S-Video, and RCA connectors. The f-theta lens provides a 180-degree field of view with Infinite Depth of Focus, meaning that once focused, everything outside the lens remains in focus.

Elumens Image Technology

VisionStation leverages Elumens' TruTheta imaging technology to deliver an immersive experience. The 180-degree x 135-degree field of view makes you feel like you're physically inside the scene. Distractions are minimized as your peripheral vision takes in the projected image rather than the environment around you. This contrasts with head-mounted displays commonly used for virtual reality, which isolate you completely from the outside world. Elumens believes the VisionStation provides a superior experience by allowing immersion without detaching from your surroundings.

TruTheta integrates cutting-edge 3-D software algorithms with the f-theta lens system to produce exceptional projection on a hemispherical screen. The aim is to ensure that the images are consistently bright, evenly distributed, and sharply in focus. To achieve this, the TruTheta lens evenly spreads pixels across the hemispherical surface, effectively eliminating distortion.

To generate the 3-D scenes, Elumens suggests using the four-camera process. First, you create a scene in a 3-D-animation program, with a single (primary) camera tracking the animation. After the scene is set up, you replicate the original camera four times. These additional cameras are rotated 90 degrees on the camera axis to capture different sections of the scene. The four added perspectives are:

After rendering the animation from four different perspectives, the software TruFrame is used to merge these four scenes into one unified view, providing all the necessary details for a 180-degree projection.

Frames are generally rendered at a resolution of 1024 x 1024 pixels, with each TruFrame frame being created by combining the four distinct views.

Elumens is collaborating with developers to create plug-ins for popular 3-D software that will streamline the process of creating 180-degree scenes, replacing the manual four-camera approach. One such example is TruShade for Raygun, a plug-in for 3-D Studio Max that utilizes the Raygun rendering engine to create hemispherical scenes without the need for setting up multiple camera angles.

Explaining the VisionStation is simple, but words alone cannot capture the full experience of using it. When seated in front of the system and operating a 3-D simulator, the sensation is breathtaking! You truly feel motion and depth as you navigate through the virtual world.

VisionStation Uses

Priced at $19,995 for the basic setup, the VisionStation is not meant for casual users or gamers. It is designed for professional use in fields like:

Although the current models remain out of reach for most home users due to their high price, the VisionStation marks the beginning of a revolution in digital imaging. In the coming years, Elumens and other display companies are likely to continue advancing how we interact with computer data.