CityWall

Citywall was created by the Ubiquitous Interaction Research Group in the IPCity project in Helsinky. CityWall is an interactive multi-touch display featuring digital media arranged into themes and events and it’s open to public experimentation at the Lasipalatsi medical center in Helsinki. CityWall currently offers passers-by a 3D GUI to explore the benefits and nuisances of urban nature. It’s able to recognize an unlimited number of fingers touching the screen and uniquely identify them. People can shuffle the content on the display as if the images are real. This creates a customizable digital experience for the user en promotes meaningful digital media interaction.

CityWall uses a projection system with multiple cameras, projectors and infrared sensors.
While not actually 3D in the physical sense, the UI is fully rendered in 3D. As the video shows, groups of files are represented as spheres, which can be manipulated in every which way. You can even look at the photo thumbnails inside the sphere 'from behind'. Though the demo is thin, it shows some really interesting ideas at play.

By sending SMS messages, users can add text comments to the display which can then be manipulated by finger-touch.  Alternatively, CityWall automatically downloads and displays photos tagged with ’helsinki’, ‘citywall’ or ‘cwhki’; if an image is tagged 'cwnicehki' CityWall categorizes it under 'nice things', whereas the tag 'cwnuishki' catageorizes the image as a nuisance.

Watch video here.
Written by Ann-Katrien Cox