Comment by bobajeff
3 days ago
I've never experienced dynamicaland in person (only seen videos). However, one concern I have about it's demos so far is that they use a projector. So you need a room dark enough to for the projected light and you need to keep your heads, hands, and body out of the way of it.
Projectors have been strong enough to be visible in decently lit rooms for ages. The reason you want the room extremely dark for most projector setups is for contrast, because the darkest thing you can make on a projected image is the ambient surface illumination (and the brightest is that surface under full power from your projector [0]). If you accept that compromise you don't need a super dark room, the recommendation for tight light control is mostly for media viewing where you want reasonable black levels.
Do still need to keep hands out of the light to see everything but that can also be part of the interaction too. If we ever get ubiquitous AR glasses or holograms I'm sure Bret will integrate them into DL.
[0] Which leads to a bit of a catch 22 you want a surface that looks dark but prefectly reflects all the colors of your projector so you need a white screen which means you ideally want zero other light other than the projector to make the projector act the most like a screen.
>you need to keep your heads, hands, and body out of the way of it.
I've seen systems like this that use multiple projectors from different angles, calibrated for the space and the angle. They're very effective at preventing occlusion, and it takes fewer than you'd think (also see Valve's Lighthouse tech for motion tracking).
Unfortunately, doing that is expensive, big, and requires recalibrating whenever it's moved.
The light level isn't an issue in practice: when I visited the actual installation during the day, the building was brightly lit with natural light and the projections were easily visible, to the point that I didn't think about it at the time.
This is true, but modern laser projectors are very, very bright. I use one as my main computer display with no problems with the blinds open, and the sun shining in.
Occlusion is definitely a problem.