Easy Video Projection Display using Luxedo!

so it's the season to give thanks and for me that means thanks for sponsors to this channel thanks for friends and family great food and technology to decorate our homes in this video we'll be looking at a video projection mapping solution that's off the shelf and turnkey for home decorations and if you know what that is then you know and if you don't stick around [Music] over the years my family's had lots of traditions and one has been me as a technologist decorating our homes using different types of technologies 15 years ago it was about rgb and individual pixel sequencing but today we're talking about newer technologies one technology that's been interesting to me has been video projection mapping and there are lots of open source stacks and you can use a raspberry pi and you can go get some open source software and mapping software that allows you to use a video projector to project images on your house and i'm sure if you've been to a theme park recently then you've seen this in action uh walt disney world is on the castle at disneyland it's at a small world and it's basically mapping um video projection to the geometry of a building or the surface that you want to project the video onto and so for home users that means projecting it on your house seasonal videos or snow falling or a turkey or whatever it may be the creativity is up to you but developing it and implementing a video projection strategy can be costly and it can be complicated so depending on where you are in terms of your technical skill sets you may be able to take this on yourself you can get your own video projector get the open source software put it on a raspberry pi calibrate it all together and and then either sequence it using something like after effects or adobe premiere and you're good to go you just send the video stream to your projector and it'll project on your house however you've designed it in your your video editing software and that's complicated and expensive for most people luxedo on the other hand is an off-the-shelf turnkey solution that simplifies it all it they put a video projector in a waterproof enclosure they've got a camera inside this it's got wi-fi uh chromecast and a cloud-based application that allows you to send your files and projects to this wirelessly um you can design them in the cloud on their platform and it's really uh you know low friction low cost of entry well not so much low cost it is about sixteen hundred bucks for this but it's low barrier to entry in terms of the complexity they make it as easy as possible and to some degree that's a little limiting and we'll get into that a little bit later so when we look at the luxedo device this is a basically a box that was shipped to me in a box it's about sixteen hundred dollars on their website uh right now they're offering a discount i think for black friday this is uh thanksgiving 2021. um and the thing that's nice about this is you won't have to go through a lot of the other challenges that you're faced with in doing it yourself they do offer other strategy where you can just get their link software and use it with your own projector if you already have a projector set up um when we look at the device it's entirely uh a waterproof enclosure all the the front and sides are sealed we look at the front we've got this nice big lens which is a 0.6 0.6 throw ratio which is extremely short throw and wide aspect ratio literally only has to be about 15 to 20 feet away from your house and it'll cover you know 50 feet wide and 50 feet tall and it's just got incredible coverage it's a 3800 lumen so it's not the brightest display so you'll want to keep in mind you know if you're using this in a city area or with street lights right in front of your house then it's going to diminish the effect that it has projecting onto your house right next to the acrylic lens which i assume is what they're using to get that 0.6 throw over to the right there's a camera and the camera is what's used to determine and calibrate the machine so that you have a reference image that you can design your animations against in addition to that on the bottom we've just got a big heatsink on the back side we've just got a fan that blows air over the heatsink we've got a power plug here and that's about it there's no buttons no on off switch nothing just plug it in and you're good to go but before we can do that and there's a few considerations while this is designed to just be mounted on the ground and it'll project flat across the the surface that it's sitting on and then up to about 100 degrees vertically and left and right you want to consider foliage landscaping in front of your house and for me you know that's i want to get it up a little bit above the grass line and the bush line so for me i'm going to build a riser if you will and i'm just going to use a milk crate and some some wood to create a hinged riser so that i can raise it up off of the ground and then adjust its angle so that i can move the field of view into the the correct location for my my setup and so let's do that real quick all right for the yard riser i'm just going to use a milk crate this is a large milk crate you can get them off of amazon um and the reason why i'm going to use this because it'll won't kill the grass for one and then i'm gonna apply this laminated plywood to the top we're gonna need to seal that so that we can use it for a couple years before having to replace it and now the reason why i have two here is because i'm gonna put a hinge there and then i'm gonna have a ratcheting little 3d printed ratcheting hinge here that will allow me to adjust the angle and the reason why you might need to do that is because the luxedo although it will throw level with the uh the surface that it's mounted to that might not be enough since i'm on a riser it might be the bottom of the projection might be above the bottom of the house and so in that regard i'm going to tilt it down so that i can get some of that field of view down lower and maybe even cropping on some of the grass and the whole point of this is to get it above the grass so that i can project down at a slight angle and ensure that i don't cast any shadows up on the house makes sense and for that since this is going to be i plan on taking the luxito even though there is a leash and you can use something like this to lock it down you know at the end of the day that crate's just going to be staked in the ground it's going to be just as easy to take the whole thing as it is to just remove the luxedo so in my case i don't have a permanent fixture that i can leash this to so i plan on bringing it in nightly and in that regard then if you perform the calibration in a specific location then you need to repeat that you need to put the device back out in the exact location so to help with that i'm going to mount these on the sides and the front so that i have a nice shoe that it'll register in and so i can consistently put it back in the same exact location so that said i need to take these out seal them up and then screw them together then mount it to that milk crate all right so taking them outside we coat them with a krylon fusion satin black finish to seal up the wood as well as make it black so it won't be visible in the display painted all the parts black and once that was done i brought them in and started screwing them to the milk crate i screwed on the hinge to affix the two boards together and then we screwed those ratcheting latches on either side to give me some adjustability on the height and angle of that riser alright so with the riser complete i need to take it out into my yard before i can start designing any animations or anything and the first thing you need to do is register the device on your account right to perform the initial setup on the projector we first have to just provide power you can use any extension cord you plug it into the back of the projector it'll automatically turn on and boot up and begin projecting a white blank screen that represents the projection area you can use that to align it or whatnot and it'll even sometimes project the directions on how to connect to if you haven't connected to it already to connect to and configure the wi-fi you'll need to use your cell phone to connect to the access point that was created when the projector booted up using luxedo and then the four-digit device id you can locate it and connect to it using the password and information that's provided in the box once you're connected your web browser on your phone will show its dashboard it'll allow you to connect to wi-fi you can scan for the networks on the device connect to your local wi-fi provide the network password and then your projector is connected to your local area wi-fi once you're done with that you'll never need to connect to the device again it'll all be done you'll be able to push projects and animations and schedule it all through the cloud application at the luxedo portal once the projector is registered i take it along with my riser out into my yard in the yard i position it so that the aspect ratio of the projection covers all of the front of the house and eaves that i have interest in projecting on and for me i'm hiding the riser box by some of these some of these character cutouts and package cutouts that i use as part of my seasonal decoration once that's in place i stake it to the ground and we're good to go once it got dark out i'm able to perform the calibration the calibration on the luxedo is when it correlates the projection video with the image video and the reason why that's important is because ultimately we're going to take a snapshot from this camera in the front and then we're going to use that to know where we need to align our video to map on the specific surfaces that we're interested in all right so let's do that in the front yard i place the projector on the riser and then provide power to it the projector will automatically boot up so let's turn our focus to the front of the house and while it's booting up once it's complete i just initialize the calibration process and then the projector will project and capture 16 different images on the display area and you'll see that change here it uses these different black and white bands to determine the aspect ratio and while it's projecting these images it's also taking pictures of the images that it's projecting and then between the images collected and the images projected it calculates the delta to calibrate the visual image with the projection image now that the calibration has been completed i've got a snapshot that reflects the orientation and it correlates that camera image and that snapshot to the actual projection video and so with that i'm going to use that as the background in their cloud application to design my animation and line up all of the videos that i want to be projected onto my house over in the luxedo portal you'll create an account log in and associate your projector with your account once your projector is associated to the account you can look at the basic settings and overview of the device which will show the latest snapshot when it was calibrated and what it's currently doing you can also look at the device settings change its name or the password to connect to it if you need to manually connect to it by default there's a wi-fi status icon that's overlaid on your video you can disable that if you want you can pair bluetooth speakers if you want to play audio in your field but keep in mind there's latency associated with bluetooth audio and you can introduce an audio delay to accommodate for that so that's your your device your projector in addition to your projector you'll need to use media you have a choice of either using the media that they provide which are just very basic icons and clip art that you can bring into the project and manipulate and animate to create some cute effects but you can also upload your own media my suggestion is that you upload your own media before you start creating a project if you know you want to use specific videos that you have or animations then upload those in advance each of these can take up to 10 minutes to upload and process before you're able to use them if you wait to do them while you're creating the animation it could be a much slower creative process than if you do these in advance so upload those in advance and save yourself some headache once your media is all uploaded it's time to create a project you go over to projects i've created a couple folders 2021 where the animations for this my season will be created and put in there and then i have a sandbox folder with a demo file all right if we load up this demo project we'll see a picture of the snap the latest snapshot from our projector and this is the area that our video will be projected on in the upper section you'll see that there's different tools that we can use you have the media you have shapes and text paths these are animation paths that you can move media around on you can add some basic effects like rotation scale and fade you can create masks you can broadcast the audio the cool thing about this is when the projector's playing back your video luxedo will automatically broadcast it to an audio stream that then your your viewers can log in on their cell phone and listen to the audio stream which is pretty cool there's also some global settings for this project which allow you to change the overall length and the type of brightness to use which will increase the intensity and saturation of the animation to improve it in areas to compensate for uh you know either muddy mid tones in your animations or you know the lighting in conditions in your in your display area that said there's the projector you can look at the settings change the snapshot if you like obviously save your project and then ultimately you render your project rendering the project will generate the video that will be played back on the projector the left hand side you've got your layers you have an audio layer which will include the audio from all other layers and then you have one or more layers that can have media on them now when you work with these tools the selected layer will have the yellow bar next to it and in the lower timeline view you'll be able to expand the layer each layer and see the media objects that exist on that as well as effects now to get started let's zoom this in a little bit the the one challenge i have with this interface is you can't resize you can resize okay so the one issue i have with this interface is that while you can resize the timeline area to see additional layers there's not a lot of latitude on how to modify the font size now if i reduce the size of the screen then the font gets really small i'd love to keep it that small and stretch it out or to have some options that allow you to do that i don't think they have that capability quite yet now in this case you can add multiple layers i would recommend using layers as a way to isolate portions of your projection area for example this layer we could call it trim and then we could create masks and associate the masks to the trim portions of our house so let's just do a quick trace here so outline this area of trim i'm not doing a great job but i just want to demonstrate this for you once i complete the loop you can see that it's in simple edit mode you want to choose in most cases the polygon edit mode that will allow you to tweak and adjust this to get it exactly right now to add a couple more pieces of trim we'll add additional masks but before we do that let's just title this one garage ever we're going to associate this to the trim layer polygon and save now we'll add a new mask and we'll trace again we're going to do a separate section of eaves we're just going to go across here get this little section of eve now do the same thing here we'll call this middle eave associate it to the trim layer polygon save now we've done those two eaves and the thing that make a mask useful is i've just isolated those eaves now if i were to put media on that layer the media is only going to show up inside those masked regions i could make it show up only outside if i want to by selecting this and changing it so you can see on the trim layer i've got two masks if i want to edit them i just select them here i can go back and tweak it a little bit if it's off to improve the accuracy and once it's saved it's updated now if i were to add media to this let's say for example some stripes and i drop them on there you only see it there if i click on it here you go you can see the outlines of that media file and you can see that it's only being displayed in the eve so a neat thing to do is once you've got that mask you can drag that video to encompass all of those eaves and i've just sequenced all those so let's call this stripes and save so now those stripes are being performed on the trim layer and if i click play down here you'll see the animation occur it's just being projected on that masked area and i can go back and add additional masks to the trim if i like but what i could also do is add another layer let's call that layer body and by body i mean the house body and that would be like the gray area so i could go in here and add additional masks as well i could do square well you know the garage isn't much of a square it's so i need to use polygon to pull down those corners to be in the correct aspect ratio allows you to skew these objects and select the very specific areas garage let me select the body save now the body is masked on the or the garage door is masked on the body area i could also do this triangle area above so if i create a new mask do a triangle pull that over here allows me to quickly and effectively uh isolate irregular shapes on my projection area garage eve and you can see how you can continue to do this to build out your animation so now i've got this triangle these two body sections on the body layer so if i were to add media to the body layer we go here let's go with something like uh this guy you can see that it's masked within the regions of those two masks so i can drag these corners make it encompass the whole area and then we'll call this garland and save now within that section if we play it back we can see the dual animations from two different pieces of media and two different layers with lots of different masks so you can continue to do this and you can also do some neat things like adding effects an effect would be for example on the trim when this starts out everything just turns on and so if we wanted to fade it in you could do an effect like fade so in this case let's do like a fade out this is going to 120 well let's just do a fade in like zero to ten fade in linear and save now you see that that's disappeared if i play it you can see it fading in increasing in opacity and then that completes it at full opacity you can add additional effects to this just by selecting stripes and clicking on effects again maybe you're going to do a rotation or something i don't know let's see what that looks like yeah so this is actually rotating let's uh the end time is 120 let's do like 15 seconds to make it more intense so you can see it fading in and rotating at the same time doesn't really work because of the size of the video that i had but you get the idea this media can be manipulated through effects and while it's masked and you apply these effects you can put them together to generate some pretty interesting animation sequences and while it can't do complicated things like after effects or adobe premiere or final cut pro you know what it can do it's very easy to use and manipulate and you can always go back you can save these projects go back and edit them and improve them over time you can add clip art for example i could hang a wreath on my wall just by adding the clip art and do all sorts of neat video projection stuff without having to learn a lot about the video editing so the barrier to entry barrier to entry is very good to learn how to use this sort of software and you also have the option of being able to import your own media which could be generated outside of this luxedo portal now when you're done and you're satisfied with the sequence that you've created you always obviously have to save this project and then you have to render the project so rendering the project takes some time you click the render button and it will take some time to upload all the changes to the cloud and the cloud will perform the rendering which is basically the flattening of all of your layers into a single video file that the projector will play back once your project's completed rendering you can preview it on the device and play it back for validation and then you can come back and edit it just keep in mind any changes that you make to layers or media or settings within the project require you to re-render them before they'll be able to be updated on the projector that said let's close out this project and i'll dive into some of the other projects that i've created first one is stripes if we play this project back you'll see some of the complexities that we've added here we've got the snow falling the stripes iterating we've got some lights on the garage and a video of santa's workshop being projected in the window as well as a couple wreaths that are being projected above in the eaves okay so to give you an idea of what that will look like or on the projector side we'll go to the render tab as this has already been rendered i can just download the video and play back that video right here you'll be able to see the actual video that will be projected from the lexita all right so once the project is complete it's been scheduled and uploaded to the machine which happens automatically by using their web app it will automatically play just power it up at the specific time and it will automatically project and play that video on the house so now we're going to share the final product of my first animation that was developed in about an hour deployed and now being projected on the home oh [Music] um [Music] [Music] all right so looking at the end result it's not as impressive as i originally hoped and that's for a number of reasons for one this is only a 1080p projector which means that the 1080p is being spread across your entire house so if you had a 1080p video that you want to play in a small section of your house then you have to realize that that's only a small section of that 1080 pixels that are across your entire house in most cases a window will be down sampled because you're really only using about maybe a 240p image area in the scope of the entire projection so don't expect to get crystal clear sharp images from this projector in a small window when you're projecting on your entire house now granted i could only project on a portion of my house if that's what i wanted to do and i could get multiple projectors to do that to cover my house with more than one projector or i could get my own projector build my own waterproof enclosure maybe get a 4k projector and then you're going to double the resolution across your projection area so that's the main thing another thing is i live in a residential area there's a couple street lights across the street from me but they cast and raise the ambient lighting of the environment such that the impact isn't as strong as it would be in a pitch black environment so most of us live in communities or residential areas and the chances are that you'll have the same issue another way to mitigate that is to get a better projector maybe you build your own you get something that's 4000 or or one of the new laser 4k 4000 lumen then you're gonna have a much brighter sharper image that you can project on your house and you can still hook up to their other product which is called the luxedo link and use your own projector setup you might get better results just depending on the conditions and how close the projector is to your house and all of that fun stuff all in all generating displays on this was really easy using their web app and that ease of use also comes with the limitation that you won't be able to do a lot of complex things and you're dependent on their servers rendering and compiling your your design and your video to be sent to the machine obviously i did outline my house in c7 bulbs and we have some and we have some net lights that we're going to put on the rest of the house but the projection mapping was an easy addition to my decorations and it looked turned out pretty good with that it's easy to use it's a lot of fun you'll have to upload a lot of the graphics and video loops that you want to use you can get lots of non-commercial uh video or vj loops from youtube you can download those using youtube downloader or other open source offerings so you'll definitely want some good clip art the higher contrast that you have on the clip art the better off you'll be there are some project settings as we covered earlier that allow you to increase the contrast and saturation to improve the resolution on your house with that in summary the luxedo solution is really lowers the bar for entry and it's really bringing video projection mapping to the masses right so you can go there if you can afford this sort of price point to get a solution that you can projection video map onto your house it's really cool it's really easy to use the calibration is painless and setting up the videos and mapping them to your environment in your display area is a piece of cake if you want to give it a shot then go to luxito.com check it out if you have your own projector and you want to build your own then you can also go check out their luxedo link if you're interested in wireless update and calibration strategy you can use your own projector and camera and do the same thing or you could be creative if depending on how much time you have on your hands and resources you can go get a raspberry pi and build it all yourself from scratch the options are out there this is the one i chose it works pretty well although i can see there's a lot of opportunity to improve it as the technology advances that said if you like this particular video give it a thumbs up it lets me know you care about these things and you enjoy them if you're new to the channel please subscribe and ring that notification bell i'll keep you updated on future videos i release with that thanks for watching i hope you have a wonderful holiday and in the meantime be safe have fun and i'll see you next time hey if you like the video please subscribe to the channel it's how we're building the community also allow me to bring better content also check me out on these other social networks there's lots of cool stuff there too

Channel: DIY Engineering

Views: 9,041

Keywords: projection, mapping, video, holiday, decorations, makers, innovation, education, maker, design, projection mapping, digital decorating, light form, simple projection mapping, easy projection mapping, baird manor

Id: VcCbuMnjJf8

Length: 33min 50sec (2030 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 26 2021