As seen on x-twitter, a geometry-nodes based fisheye effect.
This is served as is as a proof of concept.
Not production ready by any means.
Blender 5.1+… probably?
You’ll see that the setup dramatically shrinks the mesh before distorting it. I still have to learn how to manage that, but don’t have the time to tinker right now.
Feel free to make any non-criminal use of this.
Fisheye Mesh Distortion.blend (986.8 KB)
Do share your own experiments/improvements if you will!
Hey, tried to recreate following your attempt with some gemini help, and it seems results are identical to cycles fisheye, with similar node setup
left - geo nodes, right - cycles
fisheye cam.blend (168.8 KB)
Identical is excellent!
It even works (more or less) with collections, if Realize Instances is used to make the collection objects into one single thing.
I still don’t know exactly where to use this, but the possibilities of camera-driven mesh distortion interest me a lot. Thank you for sharing 
