History and Current State of the Field
Projection mapping began in 1969 in Disneyland on the Haunted Mansion. 5 busts sing the ride’s theme song with their faces projected onto them, which was quite a revolutionary idea at the time and can still be appreciated today. Disney also has the earliest patent for projection mapping entitled “Apparatus and method for projection upon a three-dimensional object”. The next instance of projection mapping came around in 1980 with an immersive film installation created Michael Naimark. In 1994 GE took a step into the world of projection mapping when they patented “A system and method for precisely superimposing images of computer models in three-dimensional space to a corresponding physical object in physical space.” In the late 1990s projection mapping began to take off when it was pursued in academia. “Spatial Augmented Reality” began thanks to the work by Ramesh Raskar, Greg Welch, Henry Fuchs, and Deepak Bandyopadhyay at UNC. It all started with a paper titled “The Office of the Future”. They imagined a world in which projections could cover any surface and the use of small monitors would become obsolete. The late 1990s also gave us the I/O (Input/Output) Bulb which was basically a projector combined with a camera thanks to John Underkoffler. In the early 2000s, research began on moveable “smart” projectors and projection mapping began to develop in even more exciting ways. Today, theme parks, theaters, and museums have all begun to incorporate projection mapping as we know it in amazingly innovative ways, and it seems as though this trend will not be stopping anytime soon.