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Turning Soap Film Into a Projector Screen
An anonymous reader writes "3 graduate students from University of Tokyo, Carnegie Mellon University, and the University of Tsukuba have developed a colloidal display — a clear projector screen that can control its transparency. Normally soap film will allow light to pass through, but the colloidal display does not. It mixes colloid into the solution and uses ultra sonic speakers to vibrate the surface of the soap film to achieve this. They have created several prototypes, such as 3D planar screen, to show how this technology can be useful."
is this the first post?
Here's a video showing the display in operation and how it works. Pretty neat...
TFS says, in part, "It mixes colloid into the solution..." This is Just Plain Wrong because there is no such thing as "colloid." A colloid is a substance microscopically dispersed evenly throughout another substance. I haven't RTFA (This is Slashdot, after all!) but I'd be willing to bet that TFA says that they add something to the solution to make it into a colloid and that the submitter (and editor) didn't bother to make sure they got it right.
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The major problem with soap films, and one that I cannot see ever being fixed, is the total lack of compelling storyline. There is a reason why soaps have never made it out of daytime TV, and film adaptations would be a guaranteed flop.
What film studio in their right mind would want to fund a soap film?
From the comments I've read so far, it doesn't sound like people are understanding this technology...
Not sure if I understand it totally either, but basically, the website seems to talk about a mixutre of 2 colloidal liquids are used to create a semi-transparent membrane where they can use ultrasound to mimic some spatially varying BRDFs (bi-directional reflectance distribution function) effects. If you haven't heard of BRDFs, they are used in 3d computer graphics to simulate realistic lighting of different surface types (light from this angle and observer direction has the surface look a certain color whereas illuminating light from a different angle and observer direction looks a different color typically described as a 4D projected map). This give some images more realistic material look (as opposed to the strange plastic look where no matter how to turn your head or change the lighting angle the same average lambertian lighting model of the object is returned).
If I read the summary correctly, this device could probably also be used like those holographic stickers or lenticular viewers with projected light (instead of reflected light) allowing for more control in time and space and thus better realism. Unfortunatly, just like holographic sticker sand lenticular viewers, it's probably just a toy device, though maybe someday, the concepts could be scaled to do something less toy-ish...