The Bubble Screen is a project that has been 2 years in the making. Even though there are other bubble display screens around (see below), the latest version of this organic display creates perfect bubbles in any size and speed and uses them as pixels to write texts or make drawings into the liquid.
The biggest challenge for the designers was to overcome the problem of "Drafting", this is when the first bubble experiences more friction and eventually the 2nd bubble (the one directly below it) catches up with the first and the image is ruined.
Beta-tank used a highly viscous liquid similar to shampoo in order to obtain a workable refresh rate. To solve other Fluid Dynamics issues Imperial College London was drafted in to create computer analysis for each bubble it travels in space. Video.
A work developed at Beta-tank by Daniel Kupfer and Eyal Burstein.
Previous version of the Bubble Screen.
Other Bubble Screens: Bubble Screen by Stephanie Andrews; Aquaplay, by Himanshu Khatri, which won the Next Idea competition this year (it was exhibited at the Ars Electronica center but was out of order when i checked it out.) A large, fluid-filled, transparent container is equipped with air vents in its base. A touchpad tells the built-in computer what pattern to produce; it’s then formed in 2D or 3D by batches of air bubbles; Water Canvas (image on the right), by Taro Suzuki, a bubble-making machine creates geometric patterns (via.)
stephanie andrews has a more advanced iteration of bubble screen, called lifeblood:
http://www.washington.edu/dxarts/profile_research.php?who=andrews
Not directly a water tank project but related: This year at Pixelspaces, Andrew Shoben talked about the prototype of a watertank bubble display Greyworld made. They later adopted the idea for the beautiful installation "The Source" at the London Stock Exchange: http://www.greyworld.org/#the_source_/i1
Another prior work here (this idea is pretty well trodden...) is Scott Hudson's work at CMU. His is more engineering-type work (i.e., it's not that pretty). Information about his "Information Percolator" here. There are videos too!
hey, thanks for the information everyone!
I would like to point out that the main difference
between this project and some of the others mentioned is that this screen can release individual bubbles with control, it does not use tubes to align them as they ascend or multiple bubbles to make up images.
Is it me or is that video not actually showing the tank doing anything, right? The legible parts seem to be renders, or is it me?
I was at a conference in Moscow 2001 with a guy from Greyworld who showed the actual thing, and it was having a guess at modelling 3d shapes.
I think he said you could text to it as well.
We have a sculpture in our lobby at the Science Museum of Minnesota that does something similar to this, called Pipedream. You can see a picture over in our flickr pool.
It was designed by the artist Bruce Shapiro. You can see a whole spiel on how he put this machine together on his website, the Art of Motion Control. He made another called Pipedream II which uses colored bubble tubes.