Aerogel is 99.8% air, yet a 1″ thick piece would protect your hand from a blow torch. It has been used to catch dust from a comet and insulate the rovers on mars. When projected onto, Aerogel captures light in a stunning manner. By adding infrared sensors to the display, we created way for viewers to interact with and control the light projected onto the aerogel pieces.

This piece has been presented multiple times with slight variations for the interactions. At Technorama Museum installation, users control projected colors by moving their hands in front of the display, while in both TED and the Summit Series installations, the aerogel pieces showed data coming in through the conference Twitter #hashtag feed.

Exhibitions

• The Swiss Technorama Museum
• TED Active 2010, Palm Springs
• The DC10 Summit Series, Washington DC

In collaboration with Dan Goods