Ghostly Images Appear Thanks To Projections On Fog

This wire-frame cube appears to be floating in mid-air because it actually is. This is a project which [Tom] calls a Laminar Flow Fog Screen. He built a device that puts out a faint amount of fog, which the intense light from a projector is able to illuminate. The real trick here is to get a uniformed fog wall, which is where the laminar part comes in. Laminar Flow is a phenomenon where fluids flow in a perfectly parallel stream, not allowing errant portions to introduce turbulence. This is a favorite trick with water.

[Tom’s] fog screen starts off with a PC fan to move the air. This airflow is smoothed and guided by a combination of a sponge, and multiple drinking straws. This apparatus is responsible for establishing the laminar flow, as the air picks up fog from an ultrasonic fogger along the way.

The only real problem here is that you want the projector shooting off into infinity. Otherwise, the projection goes right through the fog and displays on the wall, ruining the effect. Outdoor applications are great for this, as long as there’s no air movement to mess with your carefully established fog screen.

You can find a short test clip embedded after the break but there are other videos at the link above.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gZNa-mOWEGY&w=470]

28 thoughts on “Ghostly Images Appear Thanks To Projections On Fog

    1. The one in the picture here has “0100111101001101010001100100011100100001” in the bubble, which translates to “OMFG!” when translated (but I’m not 100% for sure on that).

  1. Glad to see someone beat me to the Seaquest DSV reference. I thought I was the only one that watched much less remembered it. So how long before we see this adorning gas station counters advertising male enhancement products and energy supplements?

  2. Cool, has been done before tho.
    As for those who think this is some kind of hologram, a la Seaquest, or an R2D2 projector, forget it, its not actually fully 3D, only a 2D projection on a non-solid flat display.
    …Would be cool, then, to combine, say, 8 of these in a line, to give you a kind of pseudo 3D! You’d then have to project each ‘layer’ from a sheer (shear?) angle from below to keep all the layers close to each other and to prevent images from hitting the wrong ‘screens’.
    Then again, could get clever, and somehow project 8 images from the same direction, focused for each ‘screen’. That special multi-focusing camera image software trick done recently springs to mind.

  3. I don’t know if the creator of this project, or someone who knows a lot about this topic will read this, but if so I’d like to be more interested to learn more about this, as me and my partner are interested in doing something similar to this for our ISEF project. Please email me at drewwerd@comcast.net if you’d be interested in helping us out or giving us some more information.

Leave a Reply to JDCancel reply

Please be kind and respectful to help make the comments section excellent. (Comment Policy)

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.