Preparing to spec for an open source driving simulator project in Unity and would like your advice on how to deal with multiple screens.
The intended screens are:
In front of the cab, 3 large HD screens with panoramic view
Inside the cab, 2 side and 1 rear view mirror emulated with small LCD screens in place of actual mirrors
Like this:
In the Windows Display Properties / Settings control panel, the screen layout may appear as something like this:
Question 1: can Unity drive such a setup and how would it best be implemented ?
Is it true that this would require Unity Pro but could be done with Render Textures and 4 cameras (1 for the main pano screens and 3 for the rear view mirrors) And have them display in non-overlapping viewports corresponding to the Windows Display Layout (ie Unity thinks of the whole output surface as 7584*1080 in the example above.
I would need at least two graphics cards (since modern NVidia cards can drive 3-4 simultaneous displays max) - I might have 2 cards SLI’d for the 3 main HD screens and an extra one for the small LCD screens.
Does this sound doable ? Is there a better performance way to do this ? I am trying to avoid going to multiple computers and having to deal with increased code complexity latency issues…
Question 2: is there a way to deal with bezel correction, ie accounting for the physical space taken up by monitor bezels in the real world - whereas the Windows Displays layout obviously has no gap for purposes of rendering. Does anyone have experience with NVidia’s nView bezel correction used in conjunction with Unity ? Will it “just work” ?
To do it entirely correctly you’d really have to render the three large main screens as separate cameras (because the side screens are at an angle) So that means 6 full cameras - unless there are some Unity / NVidia tricks to compensate for bezel spacing and display angles ?
Related question 3: if we were to use a curved screen and projectors instead for the front visuals, we’d need to model using a special camera or render effect to compensate for the cylindrical screen ? Also, related to bezel compensation, for projection there needs to be an overlap between cameras. Has anyone got experience or advice with that in Unity ? (Uneven projector illumination could likely be compensated with a render effect.)
Thank you very much in advance for any tips ! I will post more information and probably questions as the project takes shape.
Robert