Edinburgh Napier University

  A digital dome is a large physical object that can fully immerse one or more users and present them digital material via rear projection onto the dome’s surface. Such a system presents unique and currently unsolved possibilities for user interaction requiring more natural and ‘heads up’ solutions to maintain a sense of immersive presence whilst allowing users to interact (potentially simultaneously) with the digital material being projected. The project aims to conduct research and development to devise and develop novel User Interaction technologies (both software and if required bespoke hardware) for portable, immersive and interactive digital dome environments with an emphasis on enabling parallel collaboration and interaction by multiple local users within existing CAD software environments such as Autodesk Navisworks.
The scope of the project includes a state of the art survey for emerging and available technologies enabling advanced but simple and robust, simultaneous multi-user interaction, focusing on the use of so called “wand” devices (such as the Wii Controller) and so called Powerwall (ultra large digital display) interfaces. This will be followed by an analysis and design period for both the software and hardware architecture required and subsequent prototyping and testing.