Time to brush up on your Portuguese if you want to learn how to build your own interactive globe! Or we guess we could use Google translate…

This project was originally presented at Campus Party 2012: an annual, week-long technology festival running 24 hours a day that features LAN parties, a hackathon, conferences, and more. It all started back in 1997 in Madrid, Spain. Today, there are now Campus Parties being held in Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, the USA, Ecuador, and Germany.

The team that created it—[Araujo, Barmak, Teo, Duprat, and Silva]—has now decided to give back to the community and share a tutorial on how make your very own. The globe uses a short throw projector, a mirror, a series of infrared lights, a modified PS3 Eye camera, and an acrylic dome with projector screen paint on the inside. The touchscreen works by the IR light being reflected off of your hand on contact, which is then picked up by the PS3 Eye camera that has had its IR filter removed.

Unless you can find a suitable acrylic dome, it is, unfortunately, rather expensive to make. They had to have one manufactured. Stick around after the break to see how it works!

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