Getting wet sucks, especially if you’re that alien species from the movie Signs. Michael Burton has crafted an award-winning concept of a virtual water interactive installation. Unlike the Light Rain, you won’t find shoddy poetry and goofy dancers throughout this video. Rather, you’ll see people playing with life-like water displayed on a board.

The water will react to anything pressed up against the board including your entire body. Plants will grow in dry areas of the board, aquatic life will spawn from bodies of water and water will become stagnant if its source is severed. With multiple users, an evolving network of virtual water is obtained. The Waterboard claims to

“offer the means to encourage creating thinking to emphasis the natural progression of the Earth’s water supply”

Looks like he’s going for an eco state-of-mind and from the looks of things, it seems to be quite the success.
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We’ve seen interactive projection walls before but none as artsy fartsy as Wowlab’s. A camera identifies the contours of a human body standing in front of a wall. The projection will then interact with the persons via rain drops splashing in reaction to shadow, water puddles are created, and in the water even constellations may appear.

Now if only I could make sense of all the lousy poetry riddled all over their website.

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Jesus was known for a wide assortment of parlor tricks. If I had to choose one of Jesus’ powers, it would have to be turning water into wine, just because I’m a drunk badass like that. Arcstream AV is conquering another one of those biblical tricks with their interactive “Living Image” exhibit at The Science Museum in South Kensington, London.

Living Image uses a 6,500 lumens overhead projector and a variety of sensors that let the 1024 x 768 image of water change in real-time, depending on the visitor’s interaction with the floor display. Special infrared sensors allow for more than one person to interact with the displays at one time. Check out an awesome demo video after the jump. (more…)

*sigh* When will the geek community learn that just because an image is projected on a surface, giving the “illusion” of three dimensions, does not make a media be a “holographic” technology. We won’t deny that this interactive image projection isn’t really cool looking, but come on, it’s no hologram.

Now, with that out of the way, what the good people over at LM3Labs HAVE succeeded in creating, is a very impressive lit image projection show with some sort of gesture reading technology. It’s no hologram by any stretch, but that doesn’t make it lame. — Andrew Dobrow

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The UBWall is a Fujitsu-made concept which has burrowed its way out from under the R&D walls into Japan’s busy consumer district. UBWall is an interactive touch display with integrated Wi-Fi and RFID capabilities which first appeared about two years ago, but is only recently being used in the wild.

Financial-services company Nomura Securities is installing an still undecided amount of the UBWall terminals in a number of their institutions with the goal of providing customers with relevant information. UBWall contains a gigantic 50-inch plasma screen which lies dormant in “attract” mode until a customer approaches, which is detected through motion sensors. The integration of RFID into UBWall allows for any brochures or information about the company to be wirelessly sent to their mobile device, which really is pretty damn cool. — Andrew Dobrow

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