This Panasonic product is literally vaporware — it sprays displays into the air

Ever seen a fish swimming through water droplets in the air? Today, I learned Panasonic has been cleverly repurposing an outdoor air conditioning system to produce effects like that.

Here’s a video:

Panasonic calls it “Silky Fine Mist,” and the company primarily sells it as a way to beat the heat. The company claims its nozzles use a combination of pressurized water and compressed air to spray mist that’s so fine (six to ⁠10 microns), it doesn’t feel wet to the touch. Panasonic says the system has been adopted by “train stations and public facilities nationwide” in Japan since its 2019 debut.

But like Disney and decades of other projection mapping technologists, Panasonic quickly realized it could use the fog for art installations, too, which it has been testing out since 2018. And more recently, it’s been bringing a single hidden mist dispenser and projector to a handful of technology expos to show how amazing it could look as a piece of digital signage.

One note: Panasonic’s system doesn’t seem like it’s exactly portable — the one sprayer system it apparently sells in North America is three feet wide, three feet tall, weighs nearly 420 pounds, and consumes 2.4 kilowatts of power all by itself.

Here are a few more examples:

And here’s a video from Panasonic about how it works:

It’s not as high-quality as the many other transparent displays we’ve seen over the years, and it won’t be novel to anyone who’s seen Disneyland’s “World of Color,” which similarly projects on mist. But you can’t go up and touch any of those. This one’s literally cooler.