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.