Half Dome Screen

via Gizmodo by Danny Allen

Ha, this looks awesome. This half dome projector screen is big enough for two people to sit in front of, and isn't just a damn prototype�the California company behind it actually has them for sale.

The dome screen measures 3 by 6 feet, and uses a special 18-inch mirror to reflect the image from your projector that's hidden away on the outside. In the pic above you can see the little hole that the projector beams through, but in the video below they've just clumped it on the desk.

The screen ain't super cheap at $1440 (including international delivery), but that's still about $3000 less than some similar products we've seen in the past. If you're a gaming junkie (particularly with racers or flight sims), have a projector lying around, and don't mind a little bit of skewed perspective around the edges, then this might be an alternative to a big screen HDTV. Maybe.

3mm-Thin Digital Booth Babe

via Gizmodo by Adam Frucci on 7/9/09

This super-thin booth babe display was recently spotted on the floor of the high-octane International Stationary and Office Supply Fair (slogan: "You'll get punched in the face with excitement!").

this eye-catching digital signage system consists of a 0.3-millimeter-thick high-luminance rear-projection film (Vikuiti Rear Projection Film developed by 3M) applied to a 3-millimeter-thick glass substrate cut into the shape of a woman. A rear projector beams video onto the film, whose microbead-arrayed surface produces a crisp, brilliant image viewable from any angle, even in brightly lit environments.

That's all well and good, but can she pretend to not be skeeved out by chubby, sweaty dudes who want their pictures taken with her? That's the sign of a real booth babe.

No, This Dancing Building's Bricks Are Not Falling Like Tetris

via�Gizmodo�by Brian Lam on 4/24/09

This isn't an animation, and it's not CGI and it's not a building doing the humpty dance. It's actually the old mint in downtown SF being painted by 7 perfectly mapped HD projectors.

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]