Turning Soap Film Into a Projector Screen

An anonymous reader writes "3 graduate students from University of Tokyo, Carnegie Mellon University, and the University of Tsukuba have developed a colloidal display — a clear projector screen that can control its transparency. Normally soap film will allow light to pass through, but the colloidal display does not. It mixes colloid into the solution and uses ultra sonic speakers to vibrate the surface of the soap film to achieve this. They have created several prototypes, such as 3D planar screen, to show how this technology can be useful."

Re:not very practical currently, but pretty cool.

[jhoegl]

It may lead to better things however. For those inventors out there that want to bring true 3D to everyone by projecting it onto a 2D plane, they now have a different line of thinking to take.
Now they can think about 3d encapsulation objects to bring out true 3d.

Colloid

[techno-vampire]

TFS says, in part, "It mixes colloid into the solution..." This is Just Plain Wrong because there is no such thing as "colloid." A colloid [wikipedia.org] is a substance microscopically dispersed evenly throughout another substance. I haven't RTFA (This is Slashdot, after all!) but I'd be willing to bet that TFA says that they add something to the solution to make it into a colloid and that the submitter (and editor) didn't bother to make sure they got it right.