“Shaboned Display: An Interactive Substantial Display Using Soap Bubbles” by Hirayama and Kakehi

From childhood, we often play with bubbles. We find various aesthetic elements in a series of actions of soap bubbles: appearing, expanding, floating, bursting and disappearing. This time, we utilize the movements of soap bubbles as a pixel of an image and propose a novel interactive substantial display named “Shaboned Display.” (see Figure 1)

Mainly in the field of media art, many artists and designers have also used bubbles as a tool for expression. However, in most of the previous systems, bubbles float freely and randomly in air. For example, in “Bubble Cosmos [Nakamura et al. 2006]”, participants can interact with projection images by breaking floating bubbles with white smoke. “ephemeral melody [Suzuki et al. 2008]” also use bubbles as an interface. In this piece, musics are created according to the collisions of bubbles floating randomly. On the other hand, our Shaboned Display can show images by controlling the size of each soap bubble arranged in a matrix in a plane. As for the substantial displays, various types of material have also applied to construct visual images. One of the features of such display systems is that each pixel has a physical form and we can touch them freely. In our system, we can use each soap bubble not only as a pixel of a display but also an input tool. By exploding the soap bubbles, the displayed images change interactively.

References

NAKAMURA, M., INABA, G., TAMAOKI, J., SHIRATORI, K., AND HOSHINO, J. 2006. Bubble cosmos. In SIGGRAPH Emerging Technologies, ACM, No. 3.

SUZUKI, R., SUZUKI, T., ARIGA, S., IIDA, M., AND ARAKAWA, C. 2008. ”ephemeral melody”: music played with wind and bubbles. In SIGGRAPH Posters, ACM, No. 80.