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Walk-thru Fog Screen
fluor2 writes "Ever wanted a screen floating in air? Two scientists, Ismo Rakkolainen and Karri Palovuori, both from Tampere University of Technology, Finland have come up with an idea. It is called the Walk-thru Fog Screen. The fog screen, consisting of 'fog' that is blown down from top, and the protective laminar airflow creates a thin and crisp surface, pretty undisturbed by the air in the rest of the room, making it ideal for projector usage. People can walk right through this screen of fog. Their next idea is to use the fog as a touch-screen, making it even more accessible." For a screen one can walk through, the image quality is better than I'd have thought.
i saw it at siggraph last week in san diego. the wall of fog was not really very thick - though it did seem to be more transparent than and not as bright as it appears in the videos and stills on the site. it was still pretty cool and people seemed duly impressed, but i didn't think it was quite as convincing as a picture plane as it looks on the website.
as for noise - i don't recall it being noisy... it may not have made any noise at all. then again, the siggraph emerging technologies space is pretty noisy itself, so it may have made some sound that i didn't notice.
Quite a lot, as it happens. The main hassle being that there aren't any well established open standards that provide decent compression rates. At least, if there are then I'd be grateful for people enlightening me
I had to put video up on my site - I chose MPEG 1 at first because everyone could view it, but eventually the file sizes started getting huge and I had to switch to something else. ISO MP4 can't be played by MS WMP, Divx and what have you can't be played without installing additional software on client machines...what to pick?
In the end, I chose .wmv for a while. Seemed to give the best picture quality/file size trade-off. However, since then I've bought myself a Powerbook so all future things will be Quicktime.
Honestly - if anyone knows a format that can be played on out-of-the-box Windows, OS X and common Linux distros without the installation of any extra software, I'd love to hear about it.
Cheers,
Ian
> Wonder if you're able to breath in the room when this smoke is there for a couple of hours.
It's not smoke, it's fog. The difference is that it's not going to hang around after it leaves the laminar airflow, because it's opaque vaporized stuff (fog), not particles suspended in air (smoke). There are lots of materials that one can use to create non-persistent fog that isn't water vapor, much like the fog used in nightclubs. It'll just dissipate when it gets out of the laminar airflow.
Virg