Map Projector
KertDawg
Administrator, ProFantasy 🖼️ 4 images Surveyor
Here's something I've been working on. I 3D printed a bracket to hold a cheap video projector on a camera tripod. Why? To display maps, of course. Right now, it works, but it needs to be repositioned. It's small, but if it were any bigger the players couldn't fit their books, dice, and chips/crisps.
The map is a bitmap export of one of the Cartographers Annual maps. The most difficult part at this point is aligning the map grid with the grid on the whiteboard. The angle, focus, and zoom of the projector must be set once, and then you must align the computer display with the physical grid. If you have to scroll, then you start over. I think I need to buy a board with no grids and just use the ones on the map.
I plan to run a game soon. I'll use my own maps. I can't show them here because I don't want anyone involved to have an early peek.
and 3 others.
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The next step is to attach a webcam to the projector and use the feedback from the camera to automatically align the output to your grid, correct? Calibrate with: blink to black screen, grab the base grid, blink to grid-only projection, grab the grid to be aligned, solve for the warp, and then display the map with grid. If you're being really ambitious, you can go for one of those color-correcting things that let you project on arbitrary surfaces, but that's probably excessive for a controlled environment like this.
Cool.
My group has never been the miniature using kind, so we went with the simpler setup of using a VTT and just project to a standard vertical surface instead. Much more boring, but gets the job done.
Out of curiosity, what size in map units is that map? Trying to gauge what size maps work well with this kind of setup.
This is 5 feet per grid line, I think.
I can't tell if you're joking or not. However, OpenCV 4 is part of the long-term plan.... Roll20 is also being considered. I am moving toward a big white paper, so color-correction will not be considered. I have other projects to work on, so this will go slowly.