Controllable particle displays using water drops have the potential to provide public spaces with virtual realizations that enable visualization, touching, and sensing. There is also the potential for enabling applications such as entertainment, movie making, and remote surgery. This paper reports on fundamental research to achieve such visual realizations using objects--in this case, a rectangular parallelepiped.

The paper consists of nine sections: “Introduction,” “Previous Works,” “Implementation Using Water Drops,” “Proposed Method,” “Simulation of Behavior of Light,” “Implementation of Prototype,” “Experiment,” “Discussion,” and “Conclusion and Future Works.”

Eitoku et al. present the requirements of such visual representations and discuss previous work on controllable particle displays using water drops, with the limitation that the display requires a dark environment. The proposed method offers an increment of improvement that takes away the requirement of a dark environment. The angles at which a projector projects images onto a plane formed by falling water drops are determined via simulation. In the prototype, because of the skewness of the plane of water drops and the projector axis, the authors assert corrections to measure the improvement in brightness. The authors hypothesize that the boundary-blurring problem is caused by the refresh rate of the projectors.

This paper presents research that is at its fundamental and initial stages, with an aim toward more real applications. It provides readers with information that can be used to perform similar work with more complicated shapes and an increased display space size.