Point a projector at anything other than a completely flat screen, and you’ll end up with a distorted image…Until now. Enter this real-time image warping projector, which enables irregular projection mapping on non-flat surfaces: A team of researchers from the Ishikawa Watanabe Laboratory in Tokyo have designed a projector that can compensate for warped and moving surfaces, making the image look more like a perfectly applied sticker, instead of a projection.
It’s a technique known as projection mapping, and is similar to how textures are applied to 3D models in a video game. But this projector works in the real world, on almost any irregular object, even those with a non-rigid surface. So even when a t-shirt is fluttering away in the breeze from a fan, the projected image on it matches every little move and deformation.
