Midair User Interfaces Employing Particle Screens

Recent developments with low-cost optical sensors and ultralight, mobile fogscreens enable new applications such as midair volumetric screens and augmented reality. The major advantages of the fogscreen are its walk-through and immaterial nature, translucency, good image quality, possibility for direct interaction, and the intriguing appearance of the screen. Fogscreens can create a collaborative visualization space or even personal views for each viewer. Dual-sided face-to-face interaction mimics most real-world competitive games and sports and enables body language and free switching of sides. This article reports the authors´ experiments with these emerging technologies and their suitability for novel midair user interfaces.