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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.
is this what they call vapor-ware ?
S
Kingdom of Loathing (www.kingdomofloathing.com) Addicted is me
walk through my Blue Screen of Death!
-
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
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.
Get out of the screen what do you think you are? Made out ouf Glass?
Whats A sig anyway
My god slashdot!! Can't you keep your stories straight?? If not SEARCH GOOGLE!!. That's how I found it again.
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
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
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From the article: The fog screen enables many novel applications indoors. Interesting applications include walk-thru advertisements on shops or malls, or a walk-thru screen in world-class museums, corporate showrooms, trade fairs, theme parks, special events, spas, theatres, science centers, lobbies, etc. We can extend the technology to limited outdoor usage.
Does anyone else find it find it very disturbing that the first application they suggest is advertising?
Jason
ProfQuotes
The video features a mime. No not a MIME (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions) but one of those guys with the white face paint. A very bad choice. If they don't want people to hate their product they sound use *anything* else.
It's all just smoke and mirrors!
How will he know when the Comissioner really calls him and its not just a couple of Finns messing about with their own batsign?
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
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.
Now this is a cool and useful thing. It would be cool to have something like this in the home so I could use it as a monitor. If the main unit was hidden with a drop down keyboard. Well hidden PC :)
Rus
Cheap UK and US VPS
I watched it, it's not worth downloading. It's just two geeks walking through a screen of fog. At one point one of them flaps his hands like he is a bird lol... maybe it is kind of funny.
It's an interesting experiment anyways.
Ars Technica story on the same thing.
--- There isn't any problem that can't be solved by a small, low yield nuclear device, is there??
Yep, using closed, proprietary, non-standards when there is no absolute need to do so is _very_ irritating.
:(
... For my movie experiences in my living room!
When creating video clips like this, what is so HARD about using an open, well established standard that everyone (including the few % not running M$ media player) can use?
Btw, This is the first wmv I can't play at first attempt in mplayer under Linux. A file called 'wmv9dmod.dll' seems to be missing - can't find it on my Windows 98 installation either...
To be at least a bit on topic, this technology seems awesome! I hope there will be an "affordable" consumer version ready.... Real Soon
Yeah, geeks can now have sex with fog! Getting to hologram sex, slowly but surely. :-)
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Grab your favorite smelly hippie and head out to the old outdoor venue, forget about 90+ degree temps when you hop into the Fog Screen 3D!
Based on the "mist tents" seen at Lollapalalaala(TM), you'll trip balls walking thru the 50 foot cube of cooling fog filled with visuals that _may_ have something to do with the music!
Seriously, this is a great idea and I expect we'll see something based on this which gets the audience inside the thing at entertainment venues in the future. I also would like to say I'm glad to see it looking so good in the demo pics.
Jonah Hex
Horror & SciFi Erotic Nudes
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.
If the fog somehow is shaped as an object we want to recreate, and projected against from all sides, would this make the object look like a 'real' hologram ('real', like from the movies!) ?
I can already see a lot of applications for this. Bring out the mimejuice! And crack some ice!
This technology would be very useful for extremely realistic firearms training. Think FPS with real guns. The bullets would create holes in the fog screen which could be recognized by video sensors and this information could in turn be used as an input to the simulation.
Did you know you can fertilize your lawn with used motor oil?
To be honest, it needs work; the top of the screen looks fine, but turbulence causes the bottom of the screen to ruffle about like a flag in wind. Watch the movies provided; the bottom half of the images are all but lost to distortion.
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
I don't care how much you whine and cry, this won't be making any Star Wars style holographs. You could project a 2D image onto it, but a full 3D image (viewable from all angles), would likely be impossible. How would you manage to project images into all the crevices and such, and also how would you hold the fog in a specific shape?
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Interesting applications include walk-thru advertisements on shops or malls
Great, just what the human race needs. Another way to display advertisements. I do my best to ignore them, but if I have to walk through an ad, it's going to be hard not to see it.
What, like what these guys have been doing for years?
How about using a giant outdoor mist-screen to show flickery 8mm. movies of ghosts &c. from a concealed projector, in order to scare away the residents from an old village where you have been secretly conducting a highly lucrative but probably illegal operation, so they won't nick your money / grass you up?
.....
Oh, wait, I think this might have been done before
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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.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Then I can realize my dream, Brittney Spears backup dancer. And after the show... she leads me by the hand to her dressing room... errrrm
I mean to play Quake 10, yeah, thats it. Quake.
So, combine this with adaptive camouflage and you've got yourself an invisible secret lair from which to lauch evil plans. Super villiany is finally feasible, and just in time for Arnold to win the Governorship to do battle with, sweet!
I think you could make a pretty decent mockery of any billboard using this with a leafblower...or an industrial vacuum: "hey, mcdonalds! you *suck*"
This is a new prototype, unveiled in July 2003. A revisit instead of a new post.
Now go flame the guys posting dupes of a new Mozilla release.
Languages aren't inherently fast -- implementations are efficient
Wile E. Coyote could have actually caught the Road Runner with one of these things.
A goal is a dream with a deadline
In The Last Starfighter , Alex Rogan's mentor "Grig" described the technology used for displaying their heads up display.
Basically he said it was produced by projecting images onto a field of xeon gas. (Or something along those lines. Anyone care to refresh my memory?)
Seems to me like these guys got their inspiration from the movies. :)
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This actually reminds me more of the Membari 360 degree display of battles, and the display screens on the Whitestar fleet. They both came down from the ceiling.
This is cool technology! Although, I'd think you'd want to keep it away from wall and wooden areas to prevent the growth of mold and mildew.
At the next eco-hypocrisy-meeting, count the private jets used to get to the meeting. Should be interesting to see that
My vacuum cleaner is now a screen capture utility! Can I get a Hoover with USB?
I wonder how well a laminar flow smoke curtain would do with images projected on BOTH sides? The cool effect I imagine is walking down a corridor with several of these screens crossing it. As you walk through the image of a wall with a door in it, you turn around and see the image of the other side of the "wall". Look forward again and you see the next "wall", which you can also walk through to see what's on the other side. The series of images could give a tourist a walk right through a virtual pryramid, or some other interesting tour, like the entrance hall in the opening sequence of 'Get Smart' or MST3K.
...think of a sig, quick! Oh no! Too late... arrrrrgh!!!
Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced. - Geek's corollary to Clarke's law
Because the load on the air conditioning for removing all of that humidity from an indoor setup will be huge.
BLECH, I have yet to see a decent DivX player that doenst crash half the time MPG4 thankyou.
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No mold or mildew involved because there doesn't have to be water vapor involved. The mist does not get things wet, according to the article. That means it is not water. More like the fake smoke used for special effects, probably.
Two posts in one article and I already used my sig, now what...?
Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced. - Geek's corollary to Clarke's law
> 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
If you cast your mind back to the 'hologram' in the Captains cabin in the original Seaquest DSV, that used /exactly/ this technology.
Rich
(Some days it works really well, some days it doesn't.)
The entire structure, thus, was totally covered in fog - and they used both lasers and video projectors to color and animate the surface.
And anyway... what, nobody ever thought of shineing a video or slide projector (or laser) at fog before. Geezesus.
It has also been done in Vegas 8 years ago at the MGM Grand Hotel's EFX show (now defunct):
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++
ipv6 is my vpn
One of our favorite uses: an image that people can walk through which looks just like a solid brick wall... exactly six inches in front of a real brick wall. Get your webcams ready.
- First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then ???, then profit.
Or even better a fluid mechanics plugin for winamp! You could display fog on the fog!
This is actually a repost from a few months back. I first saw it when they demoed it at an IT convention in Helsinki -the pictures don't quite tell the truth about the quality of the image, it's in fact a lot more stable and crisp than it might seem -and sticking your hand was neat, too, although it got me into trouble actually punching one of those ancient solid-monitors we still have at the office :) Anyway, from what I've heard (haven't been around there for a while), the quality has gotten even better nowadays. I wouldn't really start speculating about holographic displays yet. It's just 'cool.'
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