The Human Media Lab has some rough plans on how to build your own rudimentary spherical display using a short-throw projector, half-sphere convex mirror, and some cleverly utilized webcams.
Our spherical display prototype is a low cost, easy to build setup that can be constructed in a short time with easily available parts. The sphere detects touches using a diffused illumination (http://wiki.nuigroup.com/Diffused_Illumination) approach to multi-touch sensing, a popular approach in the DIY community. To project over the entire surface of the sphere a projector is pointed at a half sphere convex mirror mounted at the top of the sphere . This mirror also allows the infrared camera to sense touches at any location on the sphere.
They couple it with the open-source ‘Community Core Vision’ project and a modified Screen Capture plugin to put the entire desktop of a Mac system on the sphere and allow some basic multi-touch interaction. You can see some use cases in the video below. (Unfortunately, it’s a very low-quality video but you get the point).
via DIY Spherical Display Plans | Human Media Lab :: Queen’s University.
