This isn't the first Obscura Digital creation to catch our eye. We've seen 3D multitouch holograms, crazy building projections and an 8-by-4-foot Missile Command-playing multitouch wall.

The new 18-foot long wall scales across GPUs seamlessly, and automatically splits the workspace for up to 6 users to flick through Hard Rock photo and video memorabilia, with image resolution upwards of 12 megapixels.

Complementing the video tech, an audio system creates a pinpointed local audio experience, so that each user can interact with content without interfering with others.

Man, Microsoft Surface, eat your heart out. [Obscura Digital Blog]

Obscura Digital, the company behind the light show at Youtube's Symphony last week, has has used their propriety software to control a giant HD light show spread across multiple HD projectors for a Mcafee ad. Never mind the marketing purpose, this is one of the coolest things I've ever seen. I think of it as using 3d graphics gear to make the real world look like video games, instead of using 3d graphics gear to make games appear realistic.

To get the image to look seamless, the software calculates distance and angle and surface shape of the building, compensating for brightness, picture shift, and other variables. This sort of thing would normally take months to plan, but they set up this example in a matter of days, due to the flexibility of the software. Here are examples of their other work, including the iGoogle launch in NYC (which used almost 20 projectors) and the youtube symphony. [Obscura via Fast Company]

The setup is too elaborate for anything but big-budget presentations and requires quite a bit of space to pull off, but the effect is undeniably hypnotic. It goes without saying that the system doesn't provide tactile feedback to users, so operating the the VisionAire is more akin to interpretive dancing than it is to cracking down on pre-crime in Minority Report, but I'll take what I can get. [Obscura Digital - Thanks, Steve]

[smason]