I want one!


Beyond cool. Better than the velvet fog!

The Walk-thru Fog Screen

The Basic Idea
The walk-thru fog screen is a novel and intriguing method for forming a superior quality physically penetrable dry fog display. It is a break-through technology, literally! The key features are that the screen is flat, enabling high-quality projections, and walk-thru is possible. The fog screen feels like nothing and does not make things wet. It creates a magical effect as if the images are floating in thin air.

The basic components of the screen are a laminar, non-turbulent airflow, and a thin fog screen (or any particles) injected into and inside a laminar flow. Created this way, the fog screen is an internal part of the laminar airflow, and remains thin, crisp, and protected from turbulence. When the screen is formed, images can be either rear- or front-projected onto it. The screen can be translucent (as in the images below) or fully opaque. This work has international patents pending.

Prototypes and Publicity  
Since announcing it publicly in Taejon, South Korea in Dec. 2001, the fog screen has gained an enthusiastic audience everywhere. The world premiere demonstration was in the Science Fair in Turku, Finland in October 2002. The prototype in the Science Fair was a success. It was covered in all the Finnish main TV news broadcasts, newspapers, etc. The fog screen has also been presented in New Scientist (UK), Wired (USA), Focus (D), and many other international magazines.

The first permanent prototype installation has been running reliably in Vapriikki museum in Tampere, Finland since January 24th, 2003. The famous Finnish mime actor  Markku Laitinen is the world's first artist, who has integrated the fog screen into his performance "Pierrot in Globalisation"

A highly advanced prototype was demonstrated in Siggraph 2003 Emerging Technologies in San Diego, CA, USA in July. It received a very enthusiastic audience, and it was wonderful to see how all kinds of people got very creative in front of it, immediately starting to envision all kinds of nice applications for it. We will make pilot installations around the world later this year.
Figure 1. Images are projected onto the penetrable fog screen. The images float in thin air.

Figure 2. The audience playing with the images that are projected onto the walk-thru fog screen. Lower right corner: blowing onto Monalisa.

Applications
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. We will also present some intriguing new concepts later.

The fog screen is silent and non-breakable, which enables safe gaming, exercise or training, and non-supervised public presentations. It also enables the audience to enter and exit rapidly through the walls into, e.g., virtual environments, which may be even sequential. Mixed reality and immersive projection technology could use virtual rooms with fog walls, making them effectively “virtual virtual rooms”.

MPEG video of the musem prototype (windows media 9 format (720x576, like DVD). You need a new version of windows media player to view it. 1 min. 15 sec., total 21 MB)

Posted: Sat - September 13, 2003 at 05:35 PM        

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