Project ICARUS released

[zahry]

Project Icarus is here and it is officially released! - 180º of uninterrupted viewing vistas. The first unit is almost completed and will be heading to Australia next week. Retail price for one of these little wonders is 1 750,- USD and/or 1 550,- EUR. (screen construction, mirrors, projector mounts)

 

ADD 2 cheap LED projectors and warping software and your home/gaming PC and you have the best gaming setup ever!

 

First unit is leaving to Australia next week and will be available for demoing pretty much straight away.

 

 

[Shaman]

at this price range I am looking forward to use this instead, it saves space at home:

 

this will give me full peripheral vision, and with HOTAS and MFD bezels I do not care of seeing my real hands.

Edited November 21, 2012 by Shaman

[zahry]

I know of Oculus Rift - pretty cool and good improvement, very good invention but very different product for very different purpose.

 

110 degrees fov is far away from full peripheral vision though (not too bad for 3D glasses though). It will definitely save you some space at home and 3D glasses are very good - for spectators. For flight simulation I haven't found it practical in any way. I used 3D glasses extensively and it gets old very quick - if you want to look around you have to turn your whole head - which makes the whole experience bit awkward. Looking around (just moving your eyes) is very awkward as well and it causes quite a bit of eyestrain and nausea (3D glasses have to use lenses to correct for the viewing distance - if you move your eye the image behaves as if it is behind thick glass). And I'm not mentioning the troubles when trying to pickup the joystick, click on something with mouse or find something on the keyboard (glasses go up and down like a yoyo all the time and the whole effect is spoiled). 3D glasses are fantastic invention but from my experience those are good just for passive viewing - I hope the Rift will be as good as they say - it would be great for watching VFAT and live virtual car racing.

Edited November 21, 2012 by zahry

[zahry]

Systems like the Icarus give you the advantage of natural view, no eyestrain and you can spend hours flying without reaching for a bucket. It gives you much better situational awareness as you can use your whole peripheral vision and you can multitask (use hotas, MFD, switches, mouse, keyboard) without interrupting the simulation and loosing immersion. With wide FoV you can have the nose of the aircraft pointing majority of the time forward and it gives you much better sense where the aircraft is flying and the systems can operate in 3D as well .

[BHawthorne]

Overall, I like the design. I've been pushing front dual-projection 180-degree for about a year now with multiple builds. Dual projector keeps the price of entry down as you're typically 2560x800 native, so you can push that resolution without needing SLI or Crossfire. Obviously, two projectors are more cost effective than using three. Only issue is it's easier to implement with AMD cards than NVIDIA. With NVIDIA you'll need one of the Zotac DP to Dual-HDMI Active adapters. I've spoken with zahry a few times and he seems to have a good design overall for several different rear projection screen designs. This particular one seems to be my favorite so far because of it's hardware requirements are more sensible than most multi-projector setups. Personally, I'm partial to a projection height between 48-60", but this screen would be much more manageable than what I typically do.

Edited November 25, 2012 by BHawthorne