I’m throwing a party for my nephew. He’s a fan of dragons. So I have an idea to set up an impressive show for his birthday party where he’ll be able to touch a dragon. I know that touching pressurized air can feel like a solid object, when a hand makes contact with it. So in addition to pressurized air, what else do I need for the virtual touching of a dragon?
Flamethrower?
Is it ok to bump threads here?
Touching a solid object also feels like touching a solid object. Presumably the kid will have to be blindfolded (unless you have access to some really top-of-the-line VR gear and a team of professional CGI artists) so you could just have him touch something with a suitable texture – a leather couch pillow, a leather water jar?
Then the advantage is you could warm it up beforehand for even more realism. I don’t see what the pressurized air adds?
Or is the idea that it will be an invisible dragon, and the pressurized air is supposed to give the impression of touching a solid but invisible object?
The difficulty with using pressurized air to make an “invisible object” is that real objects, even (presumably) invisible ones, have shape. Poke at it, and when your hand is a few inches away, you feel nothing, and then when you touch it, all of a sudden you do feel something. Poke at a different spot, and the surface is in a different location, and so you have to poke further or less far before you feel it. While you could in principle set up a pressurized air system with various sensors to produce this effect, it would take a heck of a lot of prep-work and development.
A huge amount of this is in the prep, the setup, the “patter” that turns a simple and obvious card shuffle into a jaw-dropping “magic trick.”
And audio. The sound of a dragon breathing, growling, whatever would go a long ways towards making some simple tactile tricks convincing. And smell… generate a froggy/bearish/lizard smell from something close to the touch point. Those can put over a simple bit of misdirection.
I, too, would advise abandoning the pressurized air method, unless you already just happen to have the equipment and the technical expertise—but that’s not to say that there aren’t alternatives, possibly even better ones.
For instance, you can get imitation alligator leather, embossed (with quite a bit of depth and detail) on cow leather, for a not entirely unreasonable or unethical price, and even in different (not existing on real animals, such as highlighted teal) colors. I bought an armload of the stuff as remnants for my brother in law as a Christmas present a couple of years ago—he’s really into medieval reenacting/larping, plus leatherwork—and was personally quite impressed with the weight and texture, and even the strong smell of the material.
I’ve seen similar materials at my local JoAnn’s Fabrics, but printed on Vinyl, as well, if you want to go the completely “cruelty free” route.
I don’t know what kind of setup you had in mind, but along the lines Amateur Barbarian suggests, maybe have it be a dragon “sleeping” in a crate, with a peephole your nephew can look through, and touch the beast’s side? Putting some kind of bellows under the “skin” might be cool, so he can feel it “breathing.”
Also, fossil or fossil-castings from dinosaurs might be an option—commercial casts of dinosaur skin impressions can be found, readily enough, and actual dinosaur teeth can be surprisingly affordable. Casts of teeth and claws, even more so.
For more scene-setting, a bit of sulfur would probably do for a dragon’s breath odor. And of course, what better bedding could a dragon have than a nice, soft, hoard of gold?