UTAKATA: Floating Bubble Display
Ayaka Ishii, Manaka Fukushima, Yasushi Matoba, Itiro Siio · 2020
We propose UTAKATA, an ephemeral display device that presents information by using floating clusters of bubbles. In our previous study, we implemented an electrolysis bubble display using drinkable beverages. Although clear clusters of bubbles could be created in short times, they did not disappear for a long time; consequently, the refresh time period of the display was considerably long. To overcome this deficiency, we present UTAKATA, a ticker-like bubble display using a running-water channel. To establish this display, a linear array of seven electrodes is fabricated on the bottom of a water channel. By activating the appropriate electrodes among the seven ones, circular bubble clusters are generated above the electrodes and then imposed to float downstream using a water flow. This allows representing an N × 7 dot-matrix display to have a shorter refresh time compared with our previous method, and expanding the range of expressions of ephemeral user interfaces using bubbles.