14 DAY TRIAL // 3D technologies are something that display solutions developers have been getting more serious about over the past year, but it seems some researchers from a certain university went as far as creating a real 3D rabbit whose different parts can be seen depending on what sides it is beheld from.
The idea of using natural (or not) masses of gas as a surface for projection is actually a pretty old one, since it is the principle lying at the basis of the means used to summon Batman, among other things.
Apparently, the idea of using fog in display technologies is not one that scientists avoid, as it was actually used by a team of researchers from Osaka University and demonstrated at Interaction 2011.
The advantage of fog displays is that “dispersion of light by fog has directionality,” something that the team exploited by means of three projectors.
Normally, a fog display has a flat surface onto which a single projector relays an image, but the Osaka inventors used three.
Each projector showed a different image and, when combined on a cylindrical fog display, ended up creating the image of an actual 3D rabbit.
In other words, depending on which side the viewer was, a different part of the virtual animal was visible.
"Ordinary fog displays use a single projector with fog on a flat surface, but this display uses three projectors, each showing a different picture. So when the observer moves around the fog, they get a three-dimensional view," the researchers reportedly said.
"The starting point for this project came when we saw a fog display in an amusement park, and wondered if we could come up with something more interesting. As future developments, we hope this system will find applications in healthcare and entertainment."
The eventual goal is to scale up the technology to bigger fog displays and more projectors, for large-format, 360-degree displays.