Atmo refractor: Spatial display by controlling heat haze

In recent years, there has been rapid development of techniques for superimposing virtual information on real-world scenes and changing the appearance of actual scenes in arbitrary ways. We are particularly interested in means of arbitrarily changing the appearance of real-world scenes without the use of physical interfaces such as glasses or other devices worn by the user. In this paper, we refer to such means as spatial displays. Typical examples of spatial displays include a system that can change the transparency or physical properties of buildings [Rekimoto, 2012] and a system that projects video images [Raskar, 2001]. However, those systems have restrictions such as requiring some kind of physical interface between the user and the scene or not being usable in a well-lit environment. Taking a different approach, we turned our attention to a natural phenomenon referred to as heat haze, in which the appearance of objects is altered by changes in the refractive index of air caused by differences in temperature distribution. We propose the atmoRefractor, a system that can generate and control heat haze on a small scale without an additional physical interface such as lenses. That locally controllable heat haze effect can be used to direct attention by changing the appearance of certain parts of scenes.