Projectors these days are not uncommon. People are buying projectors for their own homes, schools have projectors to plug computers into - they’re pretty widespread.

An application for them I hadn’t seen until a few weeks ago was projection mapping. I’ve run across a couple of posts about them on MAKE. Where traditionally you project onto a flat screen or wall, you can equally project onto any other geometry. If you have a representation of that geometry, one can create all manner of optical illusions. Perhaps some videos will make this clear:

The amazing thing about these is that something so impressive is going on that you don’t even notice it. You might think that the same illusion can be accomplished on a flat screen, but making use of the fact that your brain uses context to build a picture means that this can be much more impressive.

Beau Lotto talks about this in a really interesting TED Talk I saw recently. What I have in mind particularly is when he talks about the tiles in light and shadow and how we perceive their color. The buildings the above videos project onto are the tiles in this analogy, and by projecting varying levels of light onto them, we perceive a different situation from what’s actually happening, and what’s so amazing to me is that it’s so compelling and convincing, you don’t it didn’t quite soak in at first just how impressive it is.

I hope to be able to have a project like one of these projection mappings at KAUST.