Image Beyond the Screen

1The Origins of Projection Mapping

1.1. Introduction

Figure 1.1. Evolution of the queries of the keyword “video mapping” in French on Google from 2004 to 2019 (source: Google Trends, 2019). For a color version of the figures in this book see, www.iste.co.uk/schmitt/image.zip

When did projection mapping start? More than 10 years separate this text from the emergence of the key word “video mapping” on Google, but this criterion alone is not enough to capture its origin and requires a more distant archaeology. The materials that make up this chapter come from a collection of significant historical elements during a series of expeditions in the reflector that is the archived history of ideas and works of art or technology up to the 20th Century. Presented with a desire to go beyond the passive collection, these facts are ordered in such a way that one can understand how projection mapping can be understood as an instrument of vision comparable by similarities and differences to many other devices that preceded it, but also as an original way of seeing that has been maintained over time.

1.2. Let’s moonwalk! A short crossing through time

1.2.1. The emergence of the expressions “video mapping”, “projection mapping”, “spatial augmented reality” and “spatial correspondence” between the beginning of the 21st Century and the end of the 20th Century

By literally writing “video mapping” ...