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Walk-Thru Virtual Environment
diso writes "Walking through a wall is now really possible. WAVE, a Walk-thru Virtual Environment is a novel, low-cost, and simple method for forming a superior quality physically penetrable fog display. It is a break-through technology, literally! This work has international patents pending. An early prototype was constructed with honeycomb paper as a low-cost laminar airflow generator. When the screen is formed, images can be either rear- or front-projected onto it. Despite of being a very early prototype, the experimental fog screen already proves the operating principle with excellent results."
How is this different from the water screens that you see at the theme parks such as Disneyworld? (other than the fact that you do not need a lake)
Ok, I've reached my plagarism threshold.
Yes, this is a very nifty toy. Yes, it deserves to be posted to slashdot.
But can you, the submitter, not scrape together the two brain cells required to post a summary in your own words? Or space the two seconds to type, "From the site:" and put quotes around your text?
It's getting to the point where two thirds of the articles posted have summary text directly copied from the site being linked to. This went from "minor irritant" to "annoyance" a while back.
Actually, this has nothing to do with 3d. The only innovation here is that it is a penetrable 2d display.
The problem with this idea, is that naturally-occuring fog is 3-d (the depth is roughly the same size as the height and width) This 'machine' produces fog which, ideally, is only a centimeter or two thick, and dense enough to reflect light efficently.
With naturally occuring fog, if you had (for instance) a projector that projects an image of the road into the fog, it would be VERY unreliable as the light would reflect back well in one section, but not be reflected back in another. Yo umay think this is fine, as if no light gets reflected, you can see the road, right? Wrong. It is like watching an old 8mm being projected onto CmdrTaco's fat back, it would be distorted in most areas, and you can't see the part of the screen that shines outside his love handles. With projecting onto natural fog, it's VERY inconsitent. - Try this with a 'Batman' template and a good Maglite flashlight one night in the bathroom (with a hot shower running)
The other point I wanted to mention, is that the reason airports get shut down and you have a problem is because of the 'reflecting' nature of fog. If, for some miraculous reason, you were to project an image onto the road (or FROM the road in an airplane's case), and it was visible to the driver/pilot, the vehicle you were controling would have to shut ALL forward-pointing lights off, otherwise, the projected image won't show up. If you want proof, then make your own 'walk-thru wall' and shine a bright light at the image you are viewing. What do you see? NOTHING. (except for fog)
I didn't mean to criticize, but I wish we could make driving and flying safer because of this 'discovery', but alas we cannot. Not yet.
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HURD - Hurd's Under Research & Development