I was walking along the lake on a rainy night. I happened to notice the streams of light emerging from the golf course and wanted to recreate that effect for my exhibit.
After some research online, I learnt that the effect is called the Tyndall Effect. I tried different ways to recreate this in a controlled setting. For the first iteration, I used water and a colloidal liquid to show the path of light from a flashlight. It also worked very interestingly with Alex's lasers.
For my second iteration, I consulted Paul who suggested a variety of ways to recreate the actual fog. In the end I chose to use dry ice since it seemed the least harmful. Unfortunately the dry ice I purchased sublimed before I could document the effect, though when I tried it in the store it worked pretty well.
The ideal user interaction would be having a visitor shine a flashlight, or laser into a clear box filled with fog. I would create the fog using two beakers of ammonia and muriatic acid, which is a long term solution to create particles suspended in the air.
It's awesome that you used a natural phenomena as an inspiration for an exhibit prototype. I never knew it was called the Tyndall Effect, so thanks for sharing that. What's the difference between Tyndall and Rayleigh scattering?
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