Digital Water, Or 'You're All Wet'

Here's what happens when you combine a rare bit of spare time and searches with imprecise keywords. Words like "architect" (as in "software architect"), "embedded" (as in "embedded systems"), "programming" (as in "computer programming"), and "digital" (as in "digital").

What you end up with is something along the lines of "digital water walls". Huh?

As odd a phrase as that might seem, it is the real deal. Architects and engineers at the Massachusetts Intitute of Technology are designing buildings with the walls made of water. The building, dubbed a digital water pavilion, is an interactive structure made of digitally controlled water curtains and will be located Expo Zaragoza 2008 in Spain. It will house an exhibition area, cafe, and (presumably) public showers. (Just kidding.)

The "water walls" that make up the structure consist of a row of closely spaced solenoid valves along a pipe suspended in the air. The valves can be opened and closed, at high frequency, via computer control. This produces a curtain of falling water with gaps at specified locations -- a pattern of pixels created from air and water instead of illuminated points on a screen. The entire surface becomes a one-bit-deep digital display that continuously scrolls downward.

"To understand the concept of digital water, imagine something like an inkjet printer on a large scale, which controls droplets of falling water," explains MIT's Carlo Ratti. That helps.

William J. Mitchell, head of MIT's Design Laboratory and former Dean of Architecture at MIT, added that "in the digital electronic era, new combinations of sensor technology, embedded intelligence, networking, computer-controlled pumps and valves, and control software open up the exciting possibility of urban-scale, precisely controlled, highly interactive water."

The facade of the water pavilion will be like a very large display, with text, letters, and interactive patterns. "You could throw a ball at the wall, and then see an open circle drop down to meet it precisely where and when its trajectory intersected the water surface. And, with suitable programming, touching the water surface at any point can propagate patterns horizontally, along the wall, to other locations," Mitchell explains.

Okay, but I still like the idea of public showers.

Posted by Jon Erickson at 01:27 PM  Permalink