The Eidophor Television System

I believe an Eidophor projection system was used in the late 1970's to make possible the large screen display shown in Put That There [0] which was an influential early natural language interface (if you do check out the video, try to keep in mind just how long ago the 1970's were, how limited the compute power was, and that the interactions in the video are real speech interactions, not a canned demo - Siri was still more than 30 years in the future and the 140x192 pixel color display on the Apple II was a revolutionary innovation for the time. Put That There was truly the stuff of Science Fiction made real).

[0] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=sC5Zg0fU2e8

Many years ago...maybe 1994... I had the opportunity to play with a GE Talaria "light valve" projector that works on the same principle. The image quality, at least then, was by a large margin better than anything else on the market. The main issue we had was heat. We had 3 Talarias (Talarii?) in a smallish room. In the end we had have a dedicated HVAC run out to the roof. I believe many touring music acts would use these outdoors or for arena shows...but inside, not a great idea.

http://www.one-electron.com/Archives/GE/TalariaProject/GE-Ta...

Want to buy one? https://www.recycledgoods.com/general-electric-talaria-large...

NASA used these projectors for the large screen in the missions control room for at least the Apollo missions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eidophor#/media/File:Eidophor_...