This is pretty neat from a technical standpoint. I've used MadMapper before and it was kind of a pain to setup to use to do projection mapping.<p>First you had to hand map each section of the object you're mapping the texture onto. This involved having the projector project a pattern and you'd move and deform various mapping polygons (using a mouse) until you didn't have any bleed or holes in the projection. If someone moved (or more likely accidentally bumped) the projector or the target object the polygons had to be manually adjusted. It seems these guys have automated the process of mapping the object in physical space, against a pre computed model. They had some bleed above the top of the chair in their demo video so its not yet perfect.<p>If you're Ikea and can set this up in the store, for buying a couch, and just have people click their fabric combination they want to see. I see this being very useful because they can't show every fabric. Granted Ikea's are huge to accommodate lots of floor models, but this would still be a draw.<p>If Ikea had a whole bedroom or living room with projectors all around, you could try out an entire decorating scheme without having to pull everything together. I'd take the ferry from Wall Street to Red Hook just to play with it for a bit.<p>So rock on VizeraLabs, and start talking to Ikea and BoConcept.
It seems like the color of the furniture would have to be white, or nearly white, in order to project a full range of colors. Do they have a way of dealing with this?<p>Presumably the room also has to be dark, which might make it a bit harder to understand how the furniture will look in context. I'm curious: is there any projector technology that could make something like this work in brighter rooms?
Munich-based Extend3D also do something similar with moving objects: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qMGVCMucrsc" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qMGVCMucrsc</a><p>Their focus however is on using laserprojection for manufacturing.
I thought it was something that literally projects a material physically onto a surface. It's much more disappointingly mundane than that.<p>Bottom of idea barrel===scraped.