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

hmmm

[boogy nightmare]

is this what they call vapor-ware ?

S

Re:hmmm

[shfted!]

No, but it would be the perfect display for playing Myst...

Great.. now I'd like to

[jkrise]

walk through my Blue Screen of Death!

-

Re:Great.. now I'd like to

[Doppler00]

...and into another dimension, where the stable version of windows actually exists...

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.

Re:Seaquest DSV

[Alranor]

Well, a fairly famous book once described the marketing division of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation as 'a bunch of mindless jerks who'll be the first against the wall when the revolution comes' , that does sound like a reasonable description of SCO :)

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.

Re:It would make for a great cinema effect

[Biomechanoid]

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

Yeah you could also put signs before the ride saying "this ride is safe using smokescreens", but during the ride they actually crash really really hard into stuff.

Uuh-oh

[Jason1729]

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

Re:Uuh-oh

[Timesprout]

Why would it be disturbing that one of the most apparent uses for this technology is advertising ? Its not going to bring peace or solve world hunger. I'm sure the inventors will be looking to make a few dollars for their time and effort. The advertising industry will lap up, and pay top dollar for technology that allows them greater flexibility in advertising. Its probably the market the inventors have intended all along.

I say

[Jage]

It's all just smoke and mirrors!

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:porn?

[Jugalator]

Yeah, geeks can now have sex with fog! Getting to hologram sex, slowly but surely. :-)

i saw it at siggraph last week

[plagiarist]

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.

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.

Open-standards video

[mccalli]

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?

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

Re:Open-standards video

[anno1a]

You don't really make any sense... You didn't choose divx because it required additional software, so you chose wmv? Wmv can ONLY be played in windows, and I think it requires a fairly new version at that. And now you're switching to Quicktime?? WMP can't play quicktime, everyone hates the quicktime player, and it's hardly supported anywhere! Now you've gone from a more or less open standard, to a rather closed standard which requires a special player. What was wrong with divx again? Or the open XviD for that matter...

Ugh.

[CGP314]

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.

Re:Great for firearms training

[psavo]

This technology would be very useful for extremely realistic firearms training. Think FPS with real guns ...

Sure! This vapor+projector equipment must be way-way cheaper than cardboard used today..

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.

RTFA

[chthonicdaemon]

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.

My newest peripheral:

[roelbj]

My vacuum cleaner is now a screen capture utility! Can I get a Hoover with USB?

Not Smoke, Fog...

[virg_mattes]

> 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

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++