Vortex Ring Display

Floating Particle Screen by Vortex Ring Mass Transport

 Overview

It has been fundamental challenges for particle floating displays to maintain a group of particles as a non-turbulent projection screen. While a fog screen has been the standard method of particle floating displays, it requires a high-pressure particle diffuser or an air curtain system to stabilize the flow of particles within a thin layer or a certain small volume around particle diffuser; the depth expression is limited by the volume of a fog screen system. To form a laminar particle screen in the outside free space, alternative particle control techniques must be examined. We proposed Vortex Ring Display as a novel projectile fog screen which can significantly extend the stability of a laminar fog screen in a large depth. Vortex ring has been well known for the unique vortex stability and transportation capability, which encompasses a slug of particles within a circulating volume and thus continuously fly at the constant speed without dispersing the particles in the surrounding air. We extensively studied the usability and limitation of vortex ring displays from viewpoints of stability and quality of floating images. Our empirical study showed that vortex ring display can physically transport a floating screen toward a distant user who stands at four meters of distance away from the display system, supporting a large depth of 3D expression without vergence-accommodation conflict. The relationship between the stability of vortex ring and the quality of projected floating images was studied to find the optimal condition. Taking advantage of vortex ring's mid-air haptics feedback and capability of delivering scented air together, vortex ring display can be used as a multisensory floating interface for 4D movie and high-presence digital signage. Furthermore, vortex ring arrays based display system, Cloud display, was examined as the method to extend the imaging space for multi-users. This research was conducted under the support of CREST Digital Public Art Project.

 System Overview

1 Vortex Ring Display

2 Cloud Display

3 Volumetric 3D Particle Display

 System Demonstration

Flapping Butterfly

Rolling Dice

3D Fragrance Digital Signage

 Main Video

 Publications

Paper Yutaka Tokuda, Kunihiro Nishimura, Yasuhiro Suzuki, Tomohiro Tanikawa, Michitaka Hirose. 2009. A Proposal for a Vortex Ring Display. Journal of Information Processing Society of Japan (Japanese), Vol.50, No.12, pp.2853--2862. http://id.nii.ac.jp/1001/00067517/  
PDF [2.4MB]

Paper Yutaka Tokuda, Kunihiro Nishimura, Yasuhiro Suzuki, Tomohiro Tanikawa, Michitaka Hirose. 2010. Vortex ring based display. In Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Virtual Systems and Multimedia (VSMM'10), pp.51--54. https://doi.org/10.1109/VSMM.2010.5665968  
PDF [0.54MB]   [Best Paper Award]

Paper Yutaka Tokuda, Yasuhiro Suzuki, Kunihiro Nishimura, Tomohiro Tanikawa, Michitaka Hirose. 2010. Cloud display. In Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Advances in Computer Entertainment Technology (ACE'10), pp.32--35. https://doi.org/10.1145/1971630.1971640  
PDF [7.3MB]

Poster Yutaka Tokuda, Yasuhiro Suzuki, Kunihiro Nishimura, Tomohiro Tanikawa, Michitaka Hirose. 2010. Controllable vortex display. ACM SIGGRAPH 2008 Posters. https://doi.org/10.1145/1400885.1400939  
  [Student Research Competition Semi Finalist]