Engineers have built an interactive display using a tabletop system and mounted personal screens made of fog. Projectors light the fog for each user and a camera system monitors movements, allowing each person at the table to manipulate and share three-dimensional data.
A team at the University of Bristol in the UK say their device, called MisTable, is see-through and reach-through. Both fog screens and the table display can be manipulated by users.
"The personal screen provides direct line of sight and access to the different interaction spaces," said Sriram Subramanian, a professor of human-computer interaction. "Users can be aware of each other's actions and can easily switch between interacting with the personal screen to the tabletop surface or the interaction section. This allows users to break in or out of shared tasks and switch between individual and group work."
Compare this to the Displair, by Russian inventor Maxim Kamanin. See the MisTable video below. [University of Bristol]
This post originally appeared on Txchnologist. Txchnologist is a digital magazine presented by GE that explores the wider world of science, technology and innovation.