Some history of anamorphic projection in virtual pinball cabinets.

[Gravy]

I was just digging through my drawers and happened upon an A4 piece of paper I had printed out many years ago with an image of the Future Pinball table "Meteor" (can't remember the creator of the table offhand but it was a beautifully created table for it's time). (edit: I think it was "MartinB", Martin Brunker)

I had created this image sometime around the mid 2000's (give or take a year or two), and it was an experiment in visualising a better viewing projection for virtual pinball cabinet screens known as anamorphic projection (I didn't even know what the projection was called at first, I just knew that it would offer a varying perspective from one end of the table to the other). Up until that point in time the projection method FP used did not account properly for the player's head position and the perspective was the same across the entire length of the table, which looked very unnatural. Anamorphic projection is also used for those  sidewalk 3D chalk drawings you sometimes see as well as the ads spray painted on sporting fields, they only really work well from one viewing angle and look very distorted from others.

As far as I remember, I had made the image in Photoshop by taking a screenshot of the table in desktop mode and then using the keystone feature of Photoshop to distort the image so that it would be constricted to a rectangular format from what was initially a trapezium. I tested this out first on paper and then on a small screen laid on it's back in portrait orientation, positioning my eyes at a very low angle to the paper and screen to simulate the angle needed for cabinet viewing (edit: I just remembered that this screen would have actually been a 4:3 CRT, hence why I was initially using a printout to test).

 

The effect worked well, so I then mentioned the idea to Chris Leathley (Black, Future Pinball creator) on the now defunct FP forums. He was able to implement the projection method quite quickly and it became a feature of Future Pinball. At some later point in time, Visual Pinball also adopted a similar projection method although I was no longer active in the Virtual Pinball scene when this occurred so not sure when (perhaps someone can shed light on what VP version implemented it?).

This was a bit of a trip down memory lane for me, hopefully some of you find it interesting.

Edited February 21 by Gravy

[Gravy]

Fairly sure the table was by MartinB (Martin Brunker), a work of art for it's time.