A new project from Microsoft Research uses projection mapping to transform a conference room into an immersive, interactive environment. This is a conference room that you won’t fall asleep in.

The piece is titled “A Panorama of the Skies” and is a collaboration between light artist Maja Petrićand researcher Hrvoje Benko. Inspired by the experience of looking up at the sky, the ambient display in the room is constantly changing based on the time of day, on the climate and the location of the viewer.

The system uses the open source RoomAlive Toolkit to calibrate 5 projectors with 8 Kinect cameras, enabling display and interaction on every sq inch of the conference room. The sound was created by Daniel Peterson, a doctoral student at the University of Washington’s Center for Digital Art and Experimental Media, with an emphasis on composition, spatial sound, ambisonics, and spectral analysis.