Every projector is a triangle: the lens, the distance, the image. Set the picture you want and the space you have, pick a machine and a lens, and the third side follows, along with the mounting envelope and what the picture is worth on each grade of the range. Drag the venue to orbit it, drag the projector to walk it in and out, and take the surface by its ring to raise, lower and slide it like a real screen.
Throw ratio is distance over width. A 2.0:1 lens wants two meters of distance for every meter of picture; a zoom lens spans a range of ratios. That one division is the whole subject, and everything on this page is it, worked out. First time planning projection, or coming from the LED world? The manual walks through every control, every key, and the physics in plain words.
Whichever side you hold, the other follows through the lens. Give the surface its own size to fly a screen larger than the picture and walk the projector in and out of it. While the image center stays inside the dashed shift reach the lens absorbs any move with no keystone; past it the projector must tilt, and the planner says so.
Draw the wall in one pass, left to right, or start from a template; the stroke snaps to true lines and arcs with their measurements. Then refine it like a Bézier tool: drag a point to stretch a section, hold Shift while dragging to snap its leg to 45° steps and find square corners, pull a diamond handle to bend a section through your cursor, add a point with the Add a point chip or a double click anywhere on the line, click a point or a section for its options: fillet or chamfer at the size you type, remove the point and let its neighbors join, split sections. Shift click gathers several points; right drag boxes them; Shift right drag lassos them with a dotted trail; a drag then moves them together. Arrow keys nudge, Delete removes, Z and Y undo and redo. Or bring a plan from elsewhere: Upload a plan takes an SVG, an ASCII DXF from any CAD tool, or a picture of the plan; vectors fit straight into sections, a picture lands as a backdrop with its strongest line traced, and “the face measures” sets the real size. The gradient arrows show the light arriving on the lit face, A or B. Accept the shape and the venue builds it.
Throw distances follow each maker’s own formulas, ratio and per-lens offset, checked against the maker’s current public data; the makers themselves quote about ±5% on printed distances. The planner and its projector list are a work in progress. Missing a machine you plan with, found a figure that looks wrong, or have a suggestion? Write to info@qualia-forge.com and we add or correct it.
Columns and rows grow the picture, not the light: each tile still carries one machine’s lumens over one tile’s area, and a blend band sums to exactly one tile’s light. Stack is the brightness control: converged units add their lumens on the same raster, two nearly doubling it.
The same blend arithmetic as the configurator: content ramps sum to one picture, but every unit emits its black floor across its whole footprint, so each overlap band carries one extra floor, hard edged, visible on dark content. Stacked units add their lumens on the same tile. Ceiling units hang inverted and portrait units stand on their side, so the shift envelope follows the image, not the chassis.
One projector covers most plans. When the picture outgrows one machine, blend several into one wide image, stack units on one tile for brightness, or place every unit by hand.
The venue above is lit with the row you pick: the picture at its real brightness, the ambient veil on top, on the same arithmetic as the configurator.
The paper plan is the record: three measured drawings and one line per projector, position, aim, throw, keystone and blend, so the setup reads without the screen. The carry packs the optical case into a configurator seed: image size, surface grade, lumens, resolution, ambient light and the blend grid. The geometry stays here; a curved wall carries as its developed, flattened face. The configurator then answers the surface question at real brightness, and its own seed comes back through Recall.
The planner is a work in progress, offered as a concept: a way to sketch what could be created with this technology in your setting, not a finished engineering tool. Errors and rough edges are possible. If you find one, or have a suggestion, write to info@qualia-forge.com and we will fold it in.
A lens is named by how much distance it wants per unit of picture: a 1.5:1 lens throws a 10 m image from 15 m. Zoom lenses span a range, so one lens covers a band of positions rather than a point. Ratios at 0.4 and below are ultra short throw, built to work from touching distance.
Shift slides the lens inside its image circle, so the projector can sit above or below the picture and still throw a true rectangle. It is the difference between rigging where the venue allows and tilting into keystone. The envelope here is drawn at the projector as a dashed bar.
The same lumens over four times the area is a quarter of the light: image size is the biggest brightness decision on the page. The ladder above runs your machine across every grade of the range with the venue’s light included, on the same arithmetic as the configurator.
Past the shift envelope the projector has to tilt, and the image keystones: a wedge, brighter at the near edge, dimmer at the far one. That case has its own instrument: the configurator’s placement panel models the wedge, its brightness falloff, and what digital correction costs.