It is provided by Primeview using a Samsung 22″ LCD panel. It is an OEM version of Primeview’s PRV22TC so is just the LCD panel and video driver without any lightbox.
So what is a transparent LCD… A normal LCD is a panel made up of many pixels (in this case 1920x 1080) that let Red Green and Blue light through, behind the LCD panel is a bright backlight which provides the illumination to see the LCD (read more about normal LCDs in my first tech tuesday post)… if you take the backlight away then you have a transparent LCD. I hacked an LCD in 2003 and pulled off its backlight and had a transparent LCD… but it has taken till now for companies to start mass-producing them.

Why are they so cool? Because you can see through them.
You can put an artifact behind them and lay a layer of dynamic color information on top and you can selectively choose what is transparent and what is opaque revealing information behind the LCD. I feel like in the museum world and in the retail world where there are artifacts, a transparent LCD allows a really compelling dynamic information layer to be created. I also think that there is potential for LCD technology to drastically change how the windows of our house function allowing them to dynamically change for heating and cooling as well as put information layers on the outside wall.

In Las Vegas I saw a hybrid transparent LCD which had a backlight, but it was laser cut where the slots of the slot machine were so that you could see through the LCD screen to physical slow but the animate would flow smoothly across everything.

Some challenges with the transparent LCD

• Getting a good backlight is really hard. The light has to be even and bright for it to read well. In natural light it seems a little amber, I will check with the manufacturer to see if that is unique but I think that the normal LCD backlight helps to compensate.
• Viewing angle is different for each viewer so augmented reality for multiple people is going to be challenging, a transparent LCD paired with face recognition could adjust viewing angle for a single user.
• Our transparent LCD is distorts when looking at things that are farther than a couple feet away, making it not good for external viewing.

See below for some examples of transparent LCDs.

For the last couple of years we have seen buildings and other physical spaces projection mapped for art, advertising, performance, etc. Architectural Projection mapping is where media is projected on a three dimensional surface and the warping that would occur is corrected for. Projection mapping tends to play with the actual architecture letting it do things that it can’t and telling stories across its surface. Usually these look much better in recorded video than in real life because our eyes are better at dynamic range and therefor there is much better contrast in video.

There are a number of tools which people use to create projection mapping:

Touch Designer is a pretty powerful visual programming environment that does very high resolution media and deals with edge blending. There is a free version to play with and it supports a certain amount of interactivity.

Traditional digital signage a display playback systems like Dataton Watchout, and Pandora Coolux support it.

Some VJ tools are starting to support projection mapping like Arkaos or this custom set of tools by Miguel Espada

There are a number of 3D scanning and projection mapping combined systems like Mapamok, here is some work with a kinnect and 3d projection

Keep your eye on Mocap.. lets see what they bring

There are many more and I will keep updating.

Check out the examples of projection mapping below

A chapel turned into a musical instrument

Archifon I. – Interactive Installation from the macula on Vimeo.

The stills on this church are nice, the video doesn’t quite cut it for me

Here is a novel mapping done on the human face in an ad by Samsung

Ralph Lauren Does a projection mapped runway show in 3 cities.

The Official Ralph Lauren 4D Experience – New York from Ralph Lauren on Vimeo.

Here is a financial times Ad campaign in grand Central Station

A moving projection map of a Tiger running through Paris

Golden Tiger from le3paris on Vimeo.

Projection Mapping with moving arduino driven geometric shapes

An art installation with projection on a topographic surface

EYJAFJALLAJÖKULL from Joanie Lemercier (AntiVJ) on Vimeo.

Obscura Digital, one of the more known projection mapping companies did this simple cube projection

CO2 Cube from Obscura Digital on Vimeo.

Chevy did this interactive promotional projection mapping in LA where the users controlled the claw

An interactive pinball game projection mapped on a theater

A masque projection done by Obscura Digital

Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque Projections from Obscura Digital on Vimeo.

A projection mapped garden

STEREOSCOPIC 3D MAPPING // STEP 01 from Apparati Effimeri on Vimeo.

A beautiful projection for Amon Tobin’s ISAM tour done by VSquared Labs using Touch Designer

Amon Tobin – ‘Amon Tobin’ Boxset / ISAM Live 2012 from Ninja Tune on Vimeo.

Sony’s projection mapped room immersive movie Experience

Update:

It looks like apple is working on this as well

http://www.engadget.com/2012/05/03/patent-application-highlights-apples-continued-flirtation-with/

Senseg has created a screen that alters the electrostatic charge depending on where your finger is, which increases or decreases friction on the surface of the screen. This increased resistance is read by our mind as needing to apply more force, doing more work or encountering an obstacle. This is good for knowing when you are over a button and especially good for people with visual disabilities.

NEC and Tokyo Institute of Technology have teamed up and created a tactile touch screen which gives force feedback by actually pulling the screen around under you finger. The benefit of this technology is that it communicates direction of moving objects that you encounter on the screen.

FIngerFlux takes an approach in which there is an electromagnetic grid under the display and the user needs to wear a magnetic ring (This won’t be necessary when everyone has a magnet implanted in their finger). As a user passes their finger over the screen the magnetic field gives haptic feedback.

Microsoft has a patent for which would use infrared light to also cause a surface polymer to change shape. Allowing for a dynamic changing tactile surface.

Which of these technologies are going to end up working is not clear, but I think that we will have displays that start to touch back in the near future.

Pico Projectors-

There are two main types of Pico Projectors, Laser and LED.

Laser pico projectors use a laser beam to project the image. The advantage of Laser projectors is that there is no optics, meaning that that focus is no longer a challenge. Unlike a normal projector with a lens that needs to be focussed depending on focal distance, a laser-based projector will be in focus no matter what the distance of the projection surface is; this comes in particular usefulness when projecting on unique shapes. Unfortunately most laser-based pico projectors have very limited brightness and tend to have a bit of a “shimmery” appearance. That being said, they are working on developing larger and brighter laser-based projectors, which I predict to be one of the big advancements in display technology in the next 5 years. We have an older Micro Vision pico projector similar to the ShowWX+ that you can play with. They run about $300.

LED based pico projectors are very small projectors that use an LED light as the source for illumination. These projectors are much brighter than laser-based projectors. We have an Optoma PK 301 to play with that is about 4 times the brightness of the laser-based Pico Projector and is about the same price. Both projectors will take a variety of inputs from iPhones to computers and video cameras. The Optoma PK301 also includes the ability to use a MicroSD card to cary images and movies in the actual projector. While neither of the projectors are particularly useful in a high ambient light environment, when there is lower light environments, it is possible to create a good looking image. The display size tends to be small and would be ideal for a smaller group experience.

In our lobby we have a new multi-touch touch screen, based on Pulse IR. I will describe a little about the technology and the protocol that it uses to communicate Multi-touch information.

The LCD Screen
It is a 42″ 1920 x 1080 LCD panel made by NEC, with a PulsIR touch overlay that was created by a Korean Manufacturer and distributed by IDSPulse and integrated by TSI Touch. The panel and touch overlay comes to roughly $2500, which is a crazy competitive price.

Detailed info on PulseIr is given on the IDSPulse website, but essentially is a row of infrared LEDs around the edge which match up with a IR detector on the other side and detect when an IR beam is broken. This technology supports non-finger contact such as stylus, glove, etc and is quite durable as there is no film on the surface. You can check out a bunch of videos showcasing PulseIr technology on RND Pulse’s Youtube Chanel. The current driver seems like it could be a little more robust in options but seems to be very stable. You can do mouse up and down and drag, but I have not found a way to just move the mouse with out a click and drag which would be a nice option. The current implementation supports up to 6 simultaneous touches and uses the TUIO protocol.

The TUIO protocol is an open framework that acts to connect multi-touch information to different development platforms such as Open Frameworks, Processing, Cinder, Python, Flash, Objective C…. etc. It is used often in video tracking of multiple objects in space and can communicate information about fiducially.

There is a processing app in the doc that is a sample app from the TUIO library for processing that lets you play with the multitouch.

Here is a write up of what I was able to glean from internet research on this new venue.

It is interesting that this is the “First Episode,” it is a highly themed experience that will run for a year or so, and then I assume a “Second Episode” will be designed and produced for it.

Commercial Applications

• safety mats (large piece of machinery stops working if you step on or off of a mat). These tend to be super durable low resolution switches with no visual feedback
• Walking gait analysis, which are made of a variety of different technologies such as fsr (sensing pressure), switch matrices, (I made a a mat of 1024 switches to make dinosaur footprints where kids ran across a mat for AMNH)
• Arguably not an interactive floor, but Automated Follow Spots, spot lights that automatically follow a performer are an interesting example of giving someone a unique ID and tracking their location in space. Also made by Martin I believe that these work using two technologies; all performers where a transmitter that is listening on an RF wireless channel, the system sends out a message with a specific address that has been assigned to a person, when that persons transmitter receives that message on RF it then turns on an IR (infrared) light that a camera detects and tells the spot light where to focus…

UVA Contact Floor

Sensacell

Output Types

For visual output there are for the most part 3 camps

• LED – medium to low resolution and adds complexity to any floor based sensing technology
  • UVA – Contact using computer vision for tracking with, I believe, 10mm LED
  • Sensacell makes an interesting product which incorporates a low resolution LED floor with capacitive sensing (the technology used in your smartphone screen). An interesting thing about capacitive sensing technology is that it will sense your hand from up to 8″ or so away so you can sense a bit of z axis.
  • Youtube will provide an endlessly entertaining number of examples of LED floors if you search for “LED floor”. Below I have embedded a good one that shows a 6mm floor with video tracking. You can see that it is really fast and has a great output, but it still doesn’t know where your feet are.
• Front Projection – Which allows for very high resolution images and can be easily implemented in locations that are not as controlled (like the subway or Toys R Us) but users will cast a shadow where they are standing.
  • GestureTek uses a projector paired with an IR illuminator and IR camera to get accurate video tracking that is used as a pretty robust solution for commercial applications.
  • SnibbeInteractive uses a similar setup which is often paired with a reflective floor to create a clean background for easy tracking, you can experience this a the New York Hall of Science in Queens.
  • Ateliers-numerique in Canada developed a capacitive sensing tile which is front projected on and can be seen in the Cirque Du Soleil show “Ka” as battles unfold on a vertical wall and a projection responds in real-time to dancers impact.
• Rear-Projection – Allows for high resolution image and NO Shadows! But it needs a large space underneath and significant infrastructure and rear-projection material to support the weight of all the people on top. I have only seen this a research not commercially… but it isn’t long…
  • iGameFloor is an example of a rear projection floor that was used to make a number of simple games like pong. You can find a paper under the title “iGameFloor – a Platform for Co-Located Collaborative Games”. It tracks limbs from above and below the floor so that foot-fall contact should be possible.
  • Building on that research, a student team at Hasso Plattner Institute have created multi toe and are using technology found on a lot of large rear projected multi-touch screens but put on the floor. This gives a very high resolution image.

ZTiles

Multitoe

Sensing Technology

There are a variety of different sensing technologies to sense where walking, some detect where a foot touched the ground, some use computer vision to detect where people are but don’t know where their feet are touching, and a few are starting to be able to associate a unique ID to each person/foot. I will go through an overview of some of them:

• Above ground Video tracking – often paired with an IR emitter and IR camera for a robust system
  Pros – Very accurate, getting fast, can do some unique IDs,
  Cons – is not good at tracking exact moment and location of footfall
  • Contact
  • GestureTek
  • SnibbeInteractive
• Switches and FSR (force sensing resistors) – Accurate for detecting moment and location of foot fall in 2 – 8″ resolution but interfere with any floor-based display system like LEDs. Switches are mechanical and prone to failure when they need to be made at that density and there are some limitations to size.
  • ZTiles was research using grids of pressure sensitive tiles
• Capacitive Sensing – Using a similar technology as the one on your smart-phone screen these sense where you are between a 2″ – 12″ resolution. Capacitive sensing can also sense when you are 8″+ away from the surface giving you a bit of z-axis, this is good for removing any latency as the system can predict a foot-fall and respond. Capacitive floors can work through solid non-conductive material so they are great for dance floors and solid walls that are projected upon. They can be a little finicky to get setup, but tend to be pretty stable as long as there aren’t any major changes in the electrical environment (like touching some chunk of metal).
  • Ateliers-numerique – super durable and can have multiple touches. The inventor was working on using the sensor grid as an RFID antenna so that dancers with RFID on their shoes would be able to be uniquely identified. The sensor is somewhat opaque so that light can’t really come through and front projection must be used.
  • Sensacell uses capacitive sensing built into the same board that holds white or RGB LEDs that are medium-low resolution and can work as both sensor and light output
  • Diamond Touch is an interesting technology which attaches users to a series of different antennas that uniquely identify the user when they touch the surface. I believe that this would require users to be tethered but might be able to be developed using the idea of having a unique signal transmitted into the floor.
• Rear-projected Multi-touch IR – Using a technique that we have seen on large multi-touch rear-projected displays where an acrylic sheet with a piece of rear-projection material on top is used as a light-guide for infra-red LEDs, when an item touches the surface it is illuminated with infra-red light and is very easy to track
  • multi toe uses this system on the floor laid on top of a structural piece of glass to track users unique shoe sole pattern. This gives a high level of accuracy and uniquely identifies each foot and can tell which part of the foot has the most pressure applied. It would be interesting to see how fast the tracking system works.

Is the future this bizarre looking or are thousands of people walking around in the street looking at their devices just as strange or stranger…

Here are a couple of devices shown at CES 2012 that put a screen between you and the world around you in a potentially successful way. You are starting to get 720p resolution screens at 50″ – 90″ apparent inches with 3D capability and for a price of around $300… not bad. Got to try it to know what it is really like but maybe the fact that I never went for laser surgery wasn’t so bad…

Vuzix announced two new products coming out for the consumer market in 2013, one a full 2D 3D hdmi glasses and one a single eye piece. These work by using a pico projector that gets transmitted through light tubes in the plastic lens and recreate at the designated spot.

Lumus also released a similar pair of 3D capable 720 glasses development kit.

So this one is a little different. It is called Golden-i and is developed by Motorola, Microsoft, TI and others. It is a 15″ heads-up display with very good voice recognition and head-tracking for mouse control. The idea being that you can have a computer there and control it without using your hands. Not sure why they would want this little display instead of integrating it into one of the before mentioned AR glasses. The computer is built into the head band and runs on batteries for 6 hours (and runs windows CE). Here is Endgadgets take.

OK and because of my pop ignorance seeing things like Justin Bieber and this robot make me feel kind of awkward… and I wanted share that.

VIZIO has released a number of “CinemaWide” displays coming in at a 21:9 ratio.
Perfect for a football game and your chat/tweet/fantasy communication running on the side.

Sharp is releasing an 80″ LCD (yes 80″ (our conference room plasma is a tiny 65″) that is supposedly really affordable <$7000 (hard to believe).
Could be a game changer at that.

Multitouch

A couple of new developments in the multitouch arena.

3M is showing there 46″ multi-touch screen, the larger version of the 32″ demo that we saw in our office a couple of months ago. This is still the only large touch screen on the market that gives smartphone-quality touch with almost no latency and a smooth surface. This will be released in Q3

MultiTaction has released an “infinite touchpoint” 55″ table which is supposed to be quite good and the video is really impressive. It seems to be able to read barcodes and other visual input which is interesting as it will be a nice competitor for Samsung’s SUR40 that was made for the Surface 2

Fog Screens

FOG Screen – A company that makes 3 versions of a full fog screen system. This only requires power and a water line to play. These work by creating a thin sheet of water mist that falls evenly down to create a projection surface. It is fairly expensive and requires a decent amount of maintenance to keep it clean and functioning well but these are probably the most common ones out there. They work well indoors in a very low air-movement environment.

Water Screens

Water Screens spray water upwards to create a surface to project on. Often the mechanics are submerged in a body of water. The water spray has some depth to it so images can take on a 3D feeling but also are a bit blurry. These are usually for outdoor events and ideally in low-wind environments.

Here is a provider
Aquatic Show

Water Curtain

Water Curtains (also referred to as Water Screens by some providers) drop water from a truss above to create the projection surface. These can work for both indoor and outdoor applications.

Here are a number of providers:

See Factory or Favaran (not sure which of these companies did these projects as they feature the same projects)
Aquabatics
AVS
Aquatic Show

Digital Water Curtain

A digital water curtain known as Aqua Graphics is a product made by Aquatic Show and works by controlling the dropping of water in order to create an image. Here is a really cool video of a circular aqua graphic.

A company to look at the designs beautiful water features is Wet Design. They do great work that is very impressive.

Here is a very cool application of a water screen for a commercial that was shot in NYC pier 54 and produced by Gisellah Harvey