The Krstl sphere

Spheres are captivating projective devices for round content. You can buy them, for example from Pufferfish, but they are not cheap.

In the Krstl project, we wanted to build a low-budget, interactive spherical display devices as ‘crystals’: physical points of interaction for public places. A convex security mirror is mounted in the upper half of the translucent sphere. A projector is mounted beneath the lower hemisphere. The mirror reflects the image onto the lower hemisphere. In the base, a Mac mini running Linux acts as a WiFi hotspot and Flash projector.

People around it connect to the crystal from their mobile phones via its WiFi access point (or Bluetooth). They receive a menu of content to download and a web page to interact with the content it displays on the lower hemisphere.

Our first spherical movie was of a sky slowly rotating round the sphere so that everyone standing around gets a chance to see it. As people interact with their mobile phones, birds and flashing sunbursts appear in the sky. See the video below.

A more mundane example we built was a vote. The proposition voted on and the result so far was displayed in simple rotating text.

Want to help build better, more easily installed, more responsive spheres? Or develop  round content — maybe interactive round content — for them? Please get in touch.

The Krstl Sphere from Tim Kindberg on Vimeo.

Tags: Projection  Sphere