Obscura Digital's High Def Projections

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Power Trio: (from left) Creative director, Travis Threlkel, production head Chris Lejeune, and CEO Patrick Connolly | Photograph by James Deavin

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Searchlight Pictures: For the May relaunch of iGoogle, Obscura turned buildings (including Google's NYC HQ in the distance) into multi-story canvases. | Photograph by James Deavin

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Obscura Digital's downtown San Francisco digs are like an alternate universe dreamed up by someone who's been mainlining Pixy Stix.

"Check this out," says Patrick Connolly, the company's CEO, pressing a button on his iPhone. A 6-foot-long Chinese dragon appears on the opposite wall and slithers through the loft's wooden beams. Then Connolly leads me into a full-surround dome. "This is something we're working on for Heineken," he says. An upright, larger-than-life beer bottle materializes in the center of the space. As amber liquid gushes from the bottle, hits the roof, and trickles down the walls, I catch my breath, half-expecting to get a lungful of frothy bubbles. "That's hecka tight, you fool!" Connolly shouts at Travis Threlkel, the company's creative director. "You got some kind of particle physics going on there?"

Connolly -- a scrappy 41-year-old in yellow patent-leather Prada sneakers -- directs a team of computer graphic artists and engineers who create visual spaces and displays so groundbreaking that other design studios not only can't emulate them, they never would have conjured them in the first place. The largest projection dome on the planet, equipped with a real-time video stream? A 10-story, 60,000-lumen projection of a Michael Graves painting? If you can dream it up on an acid trip, Obscura can reproduce it -- on a seismic scale. The company's engineers have devised software programs that seamlessly combine images from multiple hi-def projectors, making mathematical corrections to account for irregular screening surfaces (a complex image given a fish-eye tweak, for instance, will look appropriately flat when projected onto a curved wall). The proprietary algorithms that drive these programs allow the team to display virtually any image on any surface -- a brick building, a jumbo jet, or the hood and windshield of a new Saturn hybrid -- with no distortion. "We're into the immersive experience. It's a holodeck kind of thing," Connolly says, referring to the computer-simulated architecture first imagined in Star Trek. "I can turn this room into the south of France. I can turn this pillar into a waterfall."

There is a guiding philosophy behind the company's free-form creative pyrotechnics. Obscura wants to take a generation of consumers left hungry by the endless flow of pap advertising and force-feed them some high-protein imaginative fiber. "We're not just doing cool things for cool things' sake; we're using our technology to make extensions of a brand," says Connolly. "We're trying to pull these companies out of the Stone Age."

From cutting-edge tech firms to old-world industrial giants, the world's most prominent companies are buying into this tantalizing pitch in droves. The buzz started when Oracle commissioned Obscura to build a video dome for its OracleWorld 2003 conference; the display introduced 20,000 visitors to grid computing by taking them on a virtual roller-coaster ride through the maze of chips and wires inside an Oracle machine. Obscura's business snowballed after that. In 2007, its 90-foot projection dome was the toast of Zeitgeist, Google's annual VIP partner summit, where corporate scenesters such as Al Gore and Time Warner chief Richard Parsons clinked glasses while glaciers, forests, and star systems soared overhead. And when Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayem, chairman of Dubai-based Nakheel, heard about the Zeitgeist splash-out, he had a "mine's bigger than Google's" moment. He asked Obscura to build a 93-foot-wide projection dome to help plug the real estate company's planned Universe development -- a series of man-made islands shaped like suns, moons, and planets. Using an uncompressed video playback system Obscura engineers had devised, production artists incorporated just-filmed video into the Universe presentation at an in-your-face resolution of 10 megapixels. "We took a shot of the islands with a helicopter flyover camera," says interactive designer Ron Robinson, "and projected that onto the dome." Says Nakheel CEO Chris O'Donnell: "It blew us away. Everyone who came marveled at not only the project but also the technology. It was so successful our chairman said, 'I want this dome for myself.' "

With dome budgets priced from $100,000 to more than $1 million for Nakheel's, what's good for the sultan is good for Obscura. And with no direct competitors -- Imax Dome projection systems, by contrast, are limited to 180-degree surround, and visual-design shops like Studio360 stick to smaller-scale interactive fare such as Web sites and kiosks -- the company has racked up high-profile commissions from Adobe, General Motors, HP, and Pioneer, to name a few. In addition, Obscura has built culture cred through video collaborations with artists including Brian Eno and the White Stripes.