It was rumored for quite a while now that Microsoft is working on a spherical multi-touch display prototype. Today, at Microsoft’s Faculty Summit in Redmond, people will get the first chance to interact with it. The sphere is built on commercially available hardware by Global Imagination of Los Gatos, California, but Microsoft managed to put the camera for tracking user interactions behind the SAME lens as the projection source. This of course is a clever way to avoid tracking from outside or a bulky globe-stand.

As of now, Microsoft does not seem to aim for a commercial version of the spherical multi-touch display, they simply want to proof the concept and also see how people accept the unconventional screen and its interaction possibilities.

Make sure to check out the video on this page.

via Engadget

Worldprocessor is an ongoing project by Ingo Günther, an artist who obviously fell in love with globes. Since 1988 he has produced more than 300 globes showing different types of information. He gatheres geosocial and scientific data from newspapers and NGOs and maps them onto standard 12-inch globes. The result is “part infographic, part networking diagram, part humanistic commentary”.

Very often you are challenged to create high impact visuals with an unappropriate budget. I guess Peter Felzman from Monte Video is pretty familiar with these requests. He did a decent job for a permanent exhibition at the Admont monastery and created a virtual room housing a video sphere. This may be trivia for some of you vvvv-geeks, but surprisingly he achieved this effect by just using rear projection and four pyramidal arranged mirrors.

Long live simplicity!!