Impact Wall

A revolutionary interactive audio-visual experience like no other.

Impact Wall turns an entire wall into a game you play with your whole body. A massive 6 m × 3.5 m projected screen reads exactly where a ball — or a Nerf dart — strikes its surface, and the on-screen world reacts instantly. Throw, kick or blast at the wall and the game responds in real time.

Purpose-built games — Asteroids, Soccer, Street Racer and Basketball — were developed in Unreal Engine and Unity and projected onto the screen, with a custom link feeding every impact from the wall straight back into the game as player input. The result is a shared, physical, all-at-once experience that brings people together — a counterpoint to single-player VR, with no headset required.

The technology

The magic is in the sensor, which is 100% proprietary and was engineered from the ground up over a 12-month period.

Behind the surface, a fine grid of invisible beams blankets the wall. The instant an object breaks the horizontal and vertical beams, the system cross-references the intersection to pinpoint the strike — resolving to roughly 16,000 addressable impact locations across the surface, fast enough to track a thrown ball in real time.

It’s driven by a distributed network of microcontrollers running custom firmware: a master board orchestrates an array of cascading 16-sensor boards that tile freely both horizontally and vertically. That modular design means the same hardware and software scale to any wall size — you simply add boards. A custom communication protocol, microsecond-accurate timing and self-calibration keep detection fast and reliable.

A small production run of sensor boards was manufactured to build the one-off unit.

In the wild

Impact Wall operated successfully for several years at Sydney’s Entertainment Quarter, where it was a hit with kids at birthday parties — and proved its reliability in a demanding, hands-on, real-world environment.

For more information on the technology, please contact Andreas.

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