2012
University of Illinois at Chicago, Electronic Visualization Laboratory
CAVE2 Construction
Over the summer time, EVL went through very extensive construction process for new CAVE2 system in the lab. That is the official second generation of CAVE that EVL introduced in 1992. This new system is such a cool piece of technology enabling large scale immersive 3D environments with cylindrical tiled displays. I am very proud of observing our new technology built right here. Below image is one of my favorite so far. (Can you find me in the one? I am the first one on the right.)
Fisheye Photography
As the system construction got close to the final stage, many colleagues in the lab made efforts to run some interesting application. And I decided to try to take some pictures of system. My good buddy, Lance, asked me if we can try something fun with very unique photo gear, fisheye lens. Why not!!! I loaned Canon EF 8-15mm fisheye zoom lens from Canon Professional Service to try this out. It's very special lens that is capable of fully circular 180 degree fisheye at 8mm to rectangular full frame fisheye at 15mm. This lens is so fun to play with even though I can not find daily use for my own purpose. Anyway, here are some pictures. We mounted a camera with this lens on the very center of CAVE2 ceiling to take a picture from top to bottom. Then, we laid down on the floor to form an interesting star shape. Very cool. While preparing camera & remote control setting, fun slow shutter ghost picture. I also tried bottom up shot with me alone. Basically put the camera on the floor pointing upward. I look very short. :)
Fisheye to Panorama Conversion
I found one interesting article about circular fisheye image and its unfolding. There is a shell script to convert a fisheye image to panorama image written by Fred Weinhaus. It uses ImageMagick library's convert program. Here is resulting panorama image from above picture. This was very cool and fun experiment with the specialty lens.
