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[Nirav Patel] is a man on a mission. Since 2011 he has been obsessed with owning a spherical display, the kind of thing you see in museums and science centers, but on a desktop scale. Unfortunately for him, there hasn’t been much commercial interest in this sort of thing as of yet. Up to this point, he’s been forced to hack up his own versions of his dream display.
That is until he heard about the Gakken Worldeye from Japan. This device promised to be exactly what he’s been looking for all these years, and he quickly snapped up two of them: one to use, and one to tear apart. We like this guy’s style. But as is often the case with cheap overseas imports, the device didn’t quite live up to his expectations. Undaunted by the out of the box performance of the Worldeye, [Nirav] has started documenting his attempts to improve on the product.
These displays work by projecting an image on the inside of a frosted glass or plastic sphere, and [Nirav] notes that the projection sphere on the Worldeye is actually pretty decent. The problem is the electronics, namely the anemic VGA resolution projector that’s further cropped down to a 480 pixel circle by the optics. Combined with the low-quality downsampling that squashes down the HDMI input, the final image on the Worldeye is underwhelming to say the least.
[Nirav] decided to rip the original projector out of the Worldeye and replace it with a Sony MP-CL1 model capable of a much more respectable 1280×720. He came up with a 3D printed bracket to hold the MP-CL1 in place, and has put the files up on Thingiverse for anyone who might want to play along at home. The results are better, but unfortunately still not great. [Nirav] thinks the sphere is physically too small to support the higher resolution of the MP-CL1, plus the optics aren’t exactly of the highest quality to begin with. But he’s just glad he didn’t have to build this one from scratch.
Going back to our first coverage of his DIY spherical display in 2012, we have to say his earliest attempts are still very impressive. It looks like this is a case of the commercial market struggling to keep up with the work of independent hackers.
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