Developing an interactive 4D cinema platform with open source tools

Abstract

4D cinema combines stereoscopic movies with additional physical elements providing different effects related to the content, such as scent, vibration and wind. This work describes the Player5D: an interactive 4D film system built upon open source software, mainly the Blender game engine and Python libraries to communicate with physical effects hardware. Complementary, interactive games corresponding to the 5th dimension have been implemented. Game objects and physical effects are synchronized with movie using standard subtitles files.