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.

Comments

Seaquest DSV

[Microlith]

So will this be installed with a "Wise Old Man" Genuine People Personality in the Captain's quarters of future naval ships?

Will we see giant submarines in the future that go into space and...

Err, sorry. Got sidetracked.

This is cool. In a 1996 sorta way.

It would make for a great cinema effect

[Ken Broadfoot]

I am not really sure what display use it has in the "real world" but it would make a great cinematic effect.

Also you could scare folks in amusement park rides making them think they are about to crash into stuff.

You could also hide behind it and spy on people maybe...

Who knows...

--ken

Re:It would make for a great cinema effect

[dmeranda]

In the real world, fog screens tend to make terrible pileups on the highways where the crashes aren't so pretend.

As far as amusement parks, good luck trying to keep a laminar airflow while a high velocity vehicle whizes by. And forget outdoors, the breeze would carry your image away, that's if you could even see it in the sunlight. Probably more useful in a haunted house ride...life-like ghosts, and cool the airflow and you also get the chill down the back of your neck too.

The foggers!

[Anonymous Coward]

This isn't going to be used in business meetings, where projection screens are available anyway. I guess smoke-screens will be used as advertising space: One could use them much closer to or in the way of the customer flow at trade shows, without risking damage to equipment or consumer. For that purpose, a little image unstability may even prove useful as eye-catcher.

Re:Seen it before

[Lumpy]

Wasn't this the type of TV set they had in Seaquest DSV for the AI computer?

Yes it was. It's simply someone that yet again took an idea from Science Fiction and made it reality.

Kinda like thise silly Sattelites, lasers and rockets to the moon :-)

It's just that it seems that science is catching up to Science Fiction alot faster these days.

Re:i saw it at siggraph last week

[DNS-and-BIND]

I saw something similar at the city center at a city in China recently...they had water spigots that sprayed fine water vapor (droplets actually). A projector projected an image onto this vaporous area. Overall it was pretty impressive, the image was several stories high. You could only see the image from one side, I had to walk a ways to get to a good spot for viewing.

Anyway, it was impressive until I saw what they were showing. All that achievement and technology, and they were showing a Doraemon anime. I think it was a pirate VCD because there were illegible subtitles on the bottom of the screen. The resolution was pretty low. It would have been much better off with a production specifically designed for the medium.

Re:i saw it at siggraph last week

[spitzak]

Saw this as Siggraph as well. It did attract a lot of interest. I walked through it, and most impressive is that you do not feel anything, the airflow is suprisingly low. The biggest problem I had is that the very bright light from the actual projector is visible, I see no way to avoid this and the image certainly looked better the more you are in line with the projector, but that light was blinding.

Also at the same show and more interesting imho:

The most important thing there was a High Dynamic Range display. They placed an LCD in front of a rear-projection display and the combined modulation results in a contrast range of 70000:1. This allows much more realistic images. The images I saw looked like a good slide projector, but could be better in a darker room. There was some registration problems, but they say they are working on using bright white LED's behind the LCD, resulting in a flat screen that is as sharp as an LCD. PS: they patented the idea, which for this I think is ok as long as they actually manufacture an open device, they were a little hesitant to say this, though the current driver is just a dual-headed graphics card and it seems hard to believe you could do much better than that.

Also interesting was a rear-projection globe. It was maybe 6' in diameter and translucent white. This used a single rear projector in the base, reflected off a cone-shaped mirror inside at the top, to project on all sides. They had software showing images of the earth, other planets, continental plate drift. The brightness was suprisingly uniform and the fact that there was a black hole at the north pole was not a problem. A trackball let you spin the globe and the image moves very solidly, indicating the geometry is pretty accurate and they matched it with their image warping software (probably a hardware renderer using texture maps to distort the image correctly). Biggest problem is the room is going to have to be really dark for it to look good.

There was also a demo of those "project on a flat surface" keyboards, and it really works. You can learn to type on it correctly in only a few minutes of practice. Biggest problem I see is that the alignment with the flat surface is critical, the phone manufacturers are going to have to come up with clever folding stands to stand the phone/pda at exactly the right angle. Also it seems obvious to me that the projected image could change, not just to different keyboards, but be used as a display. It requires distortion of the display much like that globe, but even a PDA could do that now.

Done in Vegas 7 years ago too...

[statusbar]

It has also been done in Vegas 8 years ago at the MGM Grand Hotel's EFX show (now defunct):

• One of the first noticed uniquenesses of the massive show is the absence of a curtain. Curtain functions for the 196' x 115' stage are replaced by a 90' long, 35' high wall of rushing liquid nitrogen. The wall of fog consumes 75 gallons of LN2 per minute.

I was one of the designers of a MIDI Show Control-to-Allen-Bradley PLC controller specifically designed for this show. The EFX show used dozens of them. These boxes in turn were controlled by Amigas! by Richmod Sound Design's software.

The fog wall in the show was huge, and they would project a scene onto the fog while the actors and props would be moved into place. Then the fog would dissipate and the projected 'scene' would come to life.

--jeffy++