Awesome technological *quality !
I can imagine this replacing ALL outdoor lighting. How cool would it be for street lights and signal lights to no longer require large poles, but just be a light floating in mid air 10 ft above? It could clean up metropolitan areas immensely, and remove many obstructions to taller vehicles/loads.
They just need to power up, add color, and stop the blinking so they don't trigger epileptics.

EDIT: My wife just pointed out that it's highly likely that we're now going see 'wacky wavy digital arm flailing tube men' on every corner once they commercialize this. :-(

Boosting this quality contribution up in the Hot Listing - declared quality by newtboy.

Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag.(show it anyway)

Wow, pretty Scifi stuff. I didn't think a screenless display would be possible without fog or droplets or something. Neat. Don't see how they could ever do colour though.

I think color could be achieved by having the ionization at a different frequency so it produces photons on a colored wavelength.

What I want to know is:
1) does it fry the flesh from your skeleton if you stick your hand in the middle?
and
2) how long until we can get lightsabers?

I saw this at siggraph about ten years ago. Thing is effing loud as all get out. Also, you had to wear a welding mask to operate it.

You saw it 10 years ago. What makes you think it still operates under the same conditions? 10 years is a whole age of technology ago.

Expecting this any day now ...

So fake. Jaws 19 would never exist. They'd have "rebooted" 4 times though.

> I can imagine this replacing ALL outdoor lighting.

As long as they still build a pole to hold FIVE walls around and above the light source in order to not pollute the night sky.

My thought was actually to have multiple projectors per block approximately 10 feet up (building mounted) with sensors to identify people and have them 'place' a smallish ball of light at about 8-10 feet up that floats above and in front of them, but with much less light needed than a 'street light'...and maybe stationary one's in intersections (these could even have 'covers' to stop wasted light from going up). Or, it could project tiny lights (like in the video) near ground level to illuminate the sidewalk, but that's not as useful by far.
By my estimation, there could be less pollution because there would be fewer, smaller lights on at any one time (where normal lights are just ON all night). I agree, there are many issues to solve, but it's doable if thought about thoroughly.
It's a little too late to worry about 'light pollution'...in fact I bet it's not on the average person's radar. Sadly, many people in cities have never seen stars at night and don't have a clue how much is hidden from them. (I live in the boonies of far N cali, and we still have light pollution from nearby towns, but nothing like in a city...I've even watched the international space station get re-supplied while sitting in my hot tub! That was amazing!).

What happens when you go under a bridge?

But can it make me sparkle?

Well... It was the same demo. They haven't updated their display art in any event. The resolution doesn't even look any different. Also, I'm not sure physics has changed. Making little plasma explosions in the air is typically pretty loud.

It chops the bridge in half, but that's just a glitch.

You'd need to have either the right types of atom or electron energy level transitions that correspond to ... well, how many colours do we want? I can't be bothered putting in the work to find out if that's true about air.