Digital water walls
The mission of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is to advance knowledge and educate students in science, technology, and other areas of scholarship that will best serve the world in the 21st century.
So it goes without saying that MIT's pavilion at the Expo Zaragoza 2008 in Spain is highly anticipated because it features digital water walls. They are created by closely spaced solenoid controlled valves that are accurate enough to "produce a curtain of falling water with gaps at specified locations" says MIT's Carlo Ratti, "a pattern of pixels created from air and water instead of illuminated points on a screen."
The flat roof of the structure is a shallow pond which can be raised or lowered on hydraulic pistons, depending on wind conditions. At night, when the show is closed, the pond is lowered to the ground and everything disappears.
The digital water walls will be controlled by sensors which can open up "doors" in the walls as you approach, scroll text and pictures and even, according to head of MIT's Design Laboratory William J. Mitchell, let you "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"
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