The first start in making new visuals is trying to plan ahead and a plan requires a lot of inspiration from others. No need to re-invent the wheel.

I found a lot of help from Thomas Wanner (a swiss guy) and his page about setting up a two-projector-curved-screen.

So the first thing was to measure the width of the room: 3,80 m. That number divided by 2 is 1,90 m / 190cm and that is the maximum radium of the curved screen. 1,90 cm also indicated the distance from each wall to the middle of my eye point.

The eye point is around where your head/eyes should be in the cockpit and the eye point should be in the middle between the cockpit and first officer. I have a piece of string hanging down from the ceiling to mark this position. It helps me place the cockpit correctly afterwards.

The 190 cm is the outer radium of my curved screen and then allow a bit for support columns I ended up with a screen radius of 185 cm.

Next I mounted a few screws in the ceiling one at each side and one in the front. I mounted string to these so they form a “V”. The two lines marks the “Flat screen” and is the area the projector should fill out. You need the width of the “Flat screen” to calculate where to mount the projectors.

Now it is time to turn that “V” around. I mounted a second set of string from the corner of the room and to the middle / Eye point. Your projector should be mounted on this line.

That was – more or less my calculations. However -as always with cockpit building – reality turned out differently… More on that in the next post.