Into Thin Air

Into Thin Air

adventures in interaction with screenless aerial displays

For the past couple years at Looking Glass, we've been exploring a new type of floating display that we call an Aerial Display.  Aerial displays are light-field recreations of a physical 2D screen that makes the screen appear to float in midair. These displays offer a unique way of interacting with a digital world in midair, and to us, this feels like the sci-fi holograms that we've been dreaming about since childhood.  Sensing and responding to midair interaction in a satisfying way is a difficult hardware and software challenge, and we've done a huge number of experiments around this area.

This talk will be a series of interactive demos, photos and videos showing different experiments we've done with aerial interaction.  It tells the story of our exploration with this type of display and lets participants try out our various techniques for interaction as the talk goes along. 

Bio:

Alex Hornstein is the CTO of Looking Glass Factory.  When he was nine months old, he built his first invention by stacking up a set of blocks.  Thirty-one years later, he's still doing the same stuff, just with different blocks.