For the last eight years, German presentations specialist Stereolize has been helping Microsoft do its thing at CeBIT, and every year the company tries to top the previous year's efforts. For this year's trade show, the company went super-size – creating 234-inches of diagonal, interactive touchscreen loveliness that towered above the Microsoft presenters and left onlookers having to pick their jaws up off the floor. Read on, to see a short video showing the huge display in action ...
Rather than stitch together a number of displays to form a kind of touchscreen wall, Stereolize chose to make one huge display from the biggest piece of security glass available – and even that proved a less than straightforward task. "We found out there is a limit on production size," Reiner Knollmueller from Stereolize told Gizmag. "Then another limit for transporting it and a third for operating it on a booth environment."
Even before Microsoft could attempt to build its booth, Stereolize had to erect the custom steel frame and then move in a specially-ordered crane to bring in and mount the high-gloss security glass – which weighed around half a ton – in the frame. "After some meticulous cleaning, a dedicated rear-projection foil was put into a frame and placed gluelessly behind the glass window," explained Knollmueller. "One of the many characteristics was keeping the frame as minimal as possible in order to create an almost borderless display impression."
Knollmueller told us that a 30,000 ANSI Lumen projector was used to beam the images onto the display, powerful enough to give the impression that the screen was self-illuminated, and that the touch functionality was generated by radartouch technology. "An invisible laser curtain generates two-dimensional position data with an update rate of 40ms, which is sufficient for content-driven presentations," he said.
The final ingredient in the mix was provided by the company's programmers and designers, who created the stunning, interactive display interface – at a presenter-friendly height, of course. "All presentations were completely restructured and redesigned to work with black backgrounds and to be totally different from an average PowerPoint presentation," said Knollmueller. "We took full advantage of the well known Windows Phone design and, without even using the Microsoft logo, were able to deliver 11 different presentations that looked and felt like 100 percent Microsoft."
The result was a fluid interface that seemed to move with the presenters and left audience members fascinated and awestruck.
