It took more than a year and a half to build, covers 90 square meters and can handle more than 80 people at once. The Ring Wall, developed by Sensory Minds and installed in Nurburg, Germany, is the world’s largest touch interface. The 45 meter long touch wall stands two meters high and uses 15 high definition projectors to display more than 34.5 million pixels while laser light plane illumination tracks users’ touches. On top of the mammoth screen is an even larger LED wall which is over 400 square meters in size. That LED display contains just 5.8 million pixels and is for crowd-wide presentation, not interaction. Considering its absurd scale and technological might it’s only fitting that the Ring Wall resides at a motor race track called the Nurburging. I don’t think you could really understand the size of this thing unless you were there, but check out the video after the break anyway.
Back in September I was agog over the touchscreen wall at the Hard Rock Cafe in Las Vegas. Little did I know that the Ring Wall had already been in operation for three months by that time. It’s almost unfair to compare the two, by the way, the Ring Wall is easily twelve times the size of the Las Vegas screen. Still, sound may be better at the Hard Rock Cafe as the Ring Wall only has 30 directional speakers to stretch over it’s entire length.
As for the purpose of the Ring Wall…intimidation of Sensory Mind’s competitors perhaps? I could see such displays serving well in large international museums, or as a means of sharing information in airports and train stations. Sensory Minds seems to have filled Ring Wall mainly with motor sports information, but it’s hard to tell. Eventually, technology like this, or the building-wide projectors we’ve discussed earlier, will transform all public spaces into enormous outlets for digital data. In twenty years when you’re browsing the internet by tapping on the sidewalk remember that it all started with the appearance of the Ring Wall.
[photo and video credit: Sensory Minds]
