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When you read the words “World’s largest touch-screen”, you may be forgiven a sigh, or even a yawn. What’s the point? you ask. Well, take a look at this:

The dramatic (and royalty-free) music certainly helps, but a touch-screen of this size changes the experience completely. This is no giant iPad, as you can see from the galactic swirlings that the users shoot across the screen.
The screen is the key to the immersiveness of this setup, a project designed and built at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. It wraps around the users so that everything they do seems to surround them. I can almost imagine two people hurling fireballs at each other, Street Fighter-style.
The screen is in fact the existing 3mm thick acrylic screen from the university’s existing 3D theater, rigged up with six Optitrack v120 cameras and 1,000 infra-red LEDs. The cameras are behind the screen Almost no light make it through, but when a person touched the other side, enough IR light is reflected back to be detected by the cameras.
Three aging PCs each control two cameras, and these feed their outputs to a third computer which combines the detection data. This allows the system to detect up to 100 separate touches.
It’s unlikely you’d ever get much work done on this screen, even if you were a Tom Cruise-like future-cop, but for games and pure spectacle, its hard to beat a lot of human-shaped silhouettes throwing around images created by six full-HD projectors.
Reality Touch Theatre [University of Groningen via Earth Times. Thanks, Yogesh!]
See Also:

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Fuente: Gadget Lab