There are countless collaboration startups out there that promise to help organizations improve internal team communications, but few take their efforts as far as Oblong Industries Inc. The Los Angeles-based firm, which is working to bring visual sharing technology once only imagined in science fiction to the modern office, today closed a $65 million funding round to fuel its efforts.

The financing comes courtesy of expansion-stage fund Greenspring Associates and five other institutional backers including UTIMCO, the investment arm of the University of Texas. To date, Oblong has raised $104 million in funding from seven investors.

Oblong will use the capital to enhance its flagship g-speak technology, which enables organizations to set up multi-display collaboration environments in their meeting rooms. The system shares many similarities with the futuristic touch display that Tom Cruise’s character uses in “Minority Report” to investigate criminal activity. Oblong founder John Underkoffler, who served as the technical advisor for the film, described it in a recent BBC interview as an “interface” designed to help people view complex information more easily.

At the core of g-speak is a screen synchronization mechanism that makes it possible to easily share and move objects among screens using touch controls. Depending on an organization’s implementation, workers can interact with the system via hand gestures, a wand-like controller similar to Microsoft Corp.’s Kinect or some combination of both.

The resulting user experience is surprisingly straightforward. A businessperson who wants to give colleagues a better view of their data during a presentation, for instance, can “drag” the relevant items in the air to the screen that is closest to them. And g-speak also supports a plethora of other commands designed to facilitate tasks like zooming into objects or bringing up new content.

Oblong offers organizations a choice between manually deploying g-speak on their own custom hardware setups or buying a ready-made implementation called Mezzanine. The latter system includes three large wall-mounted 1080p TVs, up to four smart boards, tracking equipment for registering user input and an appliance to keep everything synchronized. This rack-mounted box doubles as a sharing mechanism that enables workers to view a presentation on their personal devices and explore its contents by themselves.

Oblong claims that its technology has been deployed at dozens of large organizations around the world to coordinate operations. NASA, for instance, relies on Mezzanine to support communications between its astronautics and commercial aviation teams, while workers at IBM Corp.’s Watson division use it to communicate with big-ticket clients.

Besides developing new features, the company also will use the capital to expand its presence outside U.S. and Western Europe in an effort to court international organizations.

Image via Oblong Industries