Celestial sphere and UV sphere

We are currently working on a prototype to realize the idea of the 18th puzzle.

In this puzzle, a camera captures the scenery of another location and projects it onto the wall of the puzzle room using a projector. Players solve puzzles by skillfully overlapping objects in the room with projected images.

UV sphere

Since we wanted the scenery to be shown by the camera to be 360 degrees all around, we tried to project the background (the sky and distant scenery) as an image within the celestial sphere.

We obtained a 360 degree image from a material site, and since a UV sphere is suitable for projecting it, we used a UV sphere that can be created in Blender.

However, the image is projected distorted. This is because the UV map of his UV sphere (orange sphere in the image below) in Blender was not oriented for celestial projection.

A UV map like the one shown below is required.

In the end, a 360-degree image was displayed without distortion using a UV bulb found on the internet.

However, another problem is that the image is rough and the colors are strange. It seems that her HDR is involved, but we can’t find out the cause.

Apart from this, we also wanted to animate the background image with a shader, so I stopped using the celestial sphere and changed it to a cylindrical background.