Display composed of water drops for filling space with materialized virtual three-dimensional objects

Recently, the field of media art has become popular. However, most existing media art works are not suitable to exhibit in a public space. To develop technologies that enable media art works to be exhibited in a public space, we pay attention to the "spatial coexistence between the real and the virtual in public spaces"; the audience in a public space can feel as if the virtual space and real space exist together completely. In this paper, we propose a new concept, named the "controllable particle display", which is to display three-dimensional objects by filling space with small particles. On the basis of this concept we developed a prototype system using water drops as particles. In this system, a set of water drops, falling from a tank, are designed to form a plane surface. Patterns of images are projected upward on the falling water drops by a projector under the water drops. Three-dimensional objects can be observed by projecting a set of tomographic images in accordance with the position of the water drops. We also demonstrated the effectiveness of our concept and system.