AR Fluid Simulation Demo

you could get an old microsoft surface 40 inch screen, the entire display is a video stream under linux with the sur40 kernel module.

That would be hard to source / use, as It's a bit dated. But the technic behind it could be replicated. It uses IR LED on the bezel, around a glass. With total internal reflection the light only shows up where you touch the glass. Then film that with a camera. The advantage to my method, you don't get interference of objects hovering above the screen. But getting the camera & display behind the screen, could be hard.

I've just done something similar with a Object tracking + IR Floodlights and one of VA Imaging's MER2 cameras. We have had some fantastic results with objects sat on these "Interactive Dance Floors" from Alibaba. Didn't even need the IR Absorbing film to get decent tracking results using OpenCV @ 300fps or so.

This sound intriguing. Is the camera placed above the scene? How do those interactive Dance Floors come into play, did you use them for the light? Do they not have triggers, when somebody stands on it?

For me, when I said giant I meant a 8 by 40 foot wall projector that you could walk in front of and have the fluids trail off your silhouette

https://vimeo.com/27500054

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kfF3o2kLg0w

Yep, we've got the camera mounted vertically above the screen. We use the dance floors to render an interactive Unity game. The pixel density is pretty good. These panels have an array of IR LEDs embedded in them for detection but the density isn't good enough for small objects we want to track. Great for detecting anything the size of a foot or bigger.