I had thought that even any passive method of harvesting moisture from the air would be called an atmospheric water generator, even if it was something like a net or air wells, but I may well be wrong. I would agree with you that suspending something like wire mesh or nets between your plants may well yield some condensation or thaw melt and would be worth trying if you already have materials around!
We don't collect dew yet. We live in a high desert, and most years we get around 13 in. (33cm) precipitation, which we do collect for all our uses around our homestead, from drinking to watering plants. We also harvest ground
runoff using dams and seguias and plant in sunken beds filled with
mulch to capture and hold any precipitation.
This year we essentially didn't get any summer monsoon, where normally we get the majority of our rainfall for the year during that time (normally it would have just ended, but our last rain was in early August, and it was one of only three or four small rain events we got all summer). Also, monsoon is normally our most humid season, when collecting moisture from the air might work best, and it was only very briefly at all humid this year!
We are running low on water and looking into other ways to get it. We have a lot of sun, so I'm thinking something like
solar hydropanels might make the most sense, but we can't afford to buy anything like that either. I'm wondering if we could build something like the air wells out of
local clay and mud and organic matter; or if our cisterns perhaps already create condensate on their outer surfaces that we could collect (I haven't observed this; it may just be too dry here right now). We don't seem to get much dew. We do sometimes get a bit of frost.