Penetra3D: A penetrable, interactive, 360-degree viewable display

Until today, though interaction modalities with a computer have seen changes, the very way of accessing the digital information has not changed. To access, all the digital information is left behind a screen. The work of ours, in this paper, looks into the possibility of whether this digital information can be brought out of the screen and be interacted with, as if with a real object. In this paper we present a novel, 360-degree viewable 3D display which not only enables the user to visualize 3D content, but also facilitates 3D interactions and other interesting possibilities for more advanced applications. Two such applications, navigation through maps and application in the field of medicine are also presented in the paper. The display system is an `immaterial' fog display which exploits the property of directional scattering of light by fog. Using multiple projectors, different perspectives of a 3D scene/object can be projected and viewed on the screen, making it an auto stereoscopic 3D display. The depth sensor in combination with the display enables 2D and 3D interactions by the users, with the objects on the screen that appear floating in air.

1 Introduction

Since the evolution of computers we have been constantly trying to make the interface between the user and the computer better. We have moved from Command Line User Interface to Graphical User Interface and currently exploring the possibilities of Tangible User Interface [1]. But what has not changed over the years is from where this digital information is being accessed. The digital world is left behind a (computer) screen for close to a decade now. Our research was focused on 'whether it is cossible to bring this digital information out from the screen, into the real world, render it in 3D and interact with it - the very same way we interact with a real 3D object?‘. This required two steps - rendering 3D images in mid-air and interacting with them. In the later parts of the paper, we discuss the hardware enabling rendering of 3D images and interaction with them - our approach to solve the above said problem.