Japan's National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT) has been chasing
holographic damsels in distress for as long as we can remember, and honestly, the technology's still not quite there, but the team that brought us the
gCubik has managed to create a low-res 3D hologram table that impresses anyhow. Using an twist on the famous optical illusion toys that use convex mirrors to make objects appear to float in the air, NICT hits a specially-designed optical filter cone with the light from 96
pico projectors. The result is a series of familiar-looking rabbits, teapots and the occasional rubber duck standing five centimeters high and visible through 120 degrees, a good sight better than the
two-degree radius afforded them by the original technology. The best part is there's no case enclosing these creations,
unlike competing ideas, so we'll eventually see 360-degree tables where your fingers can frolic alongside the ethereal leporidae. Watch the lead researcher demo a prototype after the break.
posted July 25th 2010 3:07AM
This is why I love Engadget, always something fresh around 3 am. Trippy too!
@aopolis now I'll be seeing colorful bunnies in my sleep. Yay! Could've done with the skull though! =O
@aopolis If they are killer bunnies then maybe not..
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XcxKIJTb3Hg
@aopolis God damnit, not another Apple po- oh.
@aopolis
Im still waiting for my GossipGirl related Engadget post.
You better put out soon Mr. Engadget-People.
@DrScope As long as they don't make me see Frank, I'm happy.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0CJcfX6KZgA
Wake up...
@aopolis
I would take this over current 3D tech. At least this gives you multiple perspectives of the same object (or game/show; imagine a football game like this).
@bravokiloromeo
I can see holograms being cool for live events, some games and industry applications, but would you really want to watch a movie in hologram form?
It loses its cinematic quality if it is pushed into the living room, at least 3D done right is like looking into a window and is capable or retaining a cinematic feel because its viewed from one static point albeit with 2 perspectives..
Holograms will be cool, but for a movie or drama I think 3D is the best we're gonna get for depth if you want it to be practical and for the content to retain its intended atmosphere.
This is to BASED
GOTTA LOVE THE JAPANESE!
Projection on water/gas is better and more usefull
@DrScope no its not
@Extinction Well, a bunch of mirrors and 96 projectors vs a stream of water and 1 projector... it may not be 3D but it works, today!
@DrScope Well... take a projection screen. Is the same as the water stream. And now tell me how that can compete with the thing above?
@DrScope stream of water, being not flat, would be even more blurry and hard to maintain a proper illusion
@DrScope But it wouldn't be 3D.
Very neat, but still needs to be seen behind glass, so it's still more of an illusion, just a much more complex one.
What I want is free floating holograms. And then I want ones that can be so perfect that they would be indistinguishable to a real object of matter.
This link is closer to a free floating hologram, even though it's resolution is far far far less than what is seen above:
http://www.aist.go.jp/aist_e/latest_research/2006/20060210/20060210.html
http://pinktentacle.com/2006/02/aist-develops-3d-image-projector/
and apparently it was updated in 2007 as well:
http://pinktentacle.com/2007/07/aist-improves-3d-projector/
It's only able to create simple shapes, with very limited amount of floating points; it creates a snapping noise from each of the small plasma balls that are used to form the shapes; and it is only in one color (white), BUT it is an actually free floating image, that you could put your hand through (I don't recommend putting your hand through though, as it is created with powerful lasers being focused to single points thus super heating the air and creating plasma....) It's probably more suitable for something like an outdoor advertisement, like in times square, but it's definitely one of the first of its kind.
I have a theory on how to create life-like holograms that instead of projecting light it reflects ambient light, very much the same way how actually matter reflects light, but obviously the technology doesn't exist and probably won't exist for at least 50 years or more. /sad face
@BucksterMcgee
Yes, and I'd like to be able to interact with said hologram as an occasional distraction while I'm boldly going where no man has gone before high-fiving Captain Picard while Diana empathically senses the sexual tension as I stare her down from across the room.
But you live with what you can get.
@BucksterMcgee The issue with the 3D plasma display you mention is that light from each point is emitted in all directions, and thus the objects are always ghostly--you can see the back through the front. The setup shown above does proper occlusion: you never see through anything you're not supposed to. This requires much more computation and control over the light rays that are produced.
@CityZen You're exactly correct, each of those balls acts almost like a miniature firework exploding in the air with light rays going in all directions. For it to be down with out the opposite wall of an image bleeding in the run direction, instead of a firework exploding it all directions it would have to explode in more of a hemi-sphere, with one side, no projecting light. Eventually with enough points of projection it would have to only emit in one direction, or one direction per point visible, which becomes a difficult thing to identify as that is dependent on the viewer of the object. Even if then if that could be perfected, unless the ambient light of the room was removed, that light would still pass through this very detailed ghostly object, especially in the darker spots where there is less intensity in the light being projected, which again would cause a ghosting effect. Thus, as I see it, the only way to over come this is to some how block light rays from protruding the interior of the object and thus preventing light from bleeding through. But, even at this step, the project server better for things like a computer UI, rather than recreating real life objects. The problem at this point in that in our real world ambient light continually affects what an object looks like, even the light reflecting off our own bodies (or lack of for that matter) changes how things look, so to recreate a true object with projections would have to take into account all the possible ambient changes from every possible source of light in the room, which even for a computer powerful enough to create a realistic hologram, it is too much to calculate, as you are actually now calculating nearly all individual particles in the entire room, which unless we have single atom or single quanta processors enough for each particle we want to calculate, then we just don't have enough processing power. In this way if you rethink of it, every particle, every atom in the world is like a computer processor of sorts, producing data in real time. A single light ray of some frequency come into contact with trillions of atoms, and each atom runs a sort of computer process, or in this case the actually nature of itself, and determines what the outcome is. Does an electron move to a higher energy state and eject a photon of a different wavelength? Is the photon absorbed into the individual particles? Etc. The world we live in is very much so a collections of infinite numbers of computer processors that "process" or affect change onto the other "processors" they come in contact and themselves. If we understand that, then the best thing to do is let these processors do what they do best, and let them interact and "process" the world. Hence my theory is to create powerful superpositions using some sort of field, possibly gravity waves if possible, to create individual floating points that will interact with ambient light the same way the particle it is trying to recreate would, to basically reflect light instead of projecting it. Of course this is a wild and ridiculous idea, and something that I probably will never seen in my life time, but as best as I can think this is the closest I can come to recreating an object without physically recreating the matter of said object.
whew.
@BucksterMcgee Even if each light burst only radiated out in a hemisphere, it still wouldn't show (convex) solid objects correctly, due to the self-shadowing issue. Imagine the teapot, for instance: you'd be able to see the teapot body through the handle.
As they mention in the link, they are attempting to recreate a lightfield: for every point (belonging to a surface or a space), for every direction, recreate all the outgoing light rays. This is like computing and displaying a different hemispherical image for each pixel on your monitor (rather than having each pixel just displaying a single color across the hemisphere it is radiating).
In this implementation, they are computing many different views across 120 degrees of a horizontal arc for each pixel (a 1D arc instead of a 2D entire hemisphere). This is why you can move right and left and see different images. However, moving up and down doesn't change the image you see.
You are correct in that correctly computing how light interacts with its environment is an impossibly complex computation. However, we've obviously figured out approximations that are pretty good for dealing with a lot of cases. It will continue to be this way for a long time.
BUNNIES!
@BucksterMcgee I agree
this looks not bad but it's very similar to the other new "stuff" on holograms we see these days that all need some kind of surface or glass box to create the impression of a 3D hologram that are really not...well 3D.
I think the real breakthrough technology we all waiting for is still out there. Hopefully not too far away.
btw: this reminds me of how ridiculous the tech is that some guys use
in certain tv shows to investigate crimes (you know which ones I mean)
The writers really need to check out engadget more often.
>Using an twist on the famous optical illusion toys that use convex mirrors to make objects appear to float in the air
>>Using an twist on the famous optical illusion toys
>>>an twist
Anya's not going to like this. She HATES bunnies.
@evilbonsai lol
"...where your fingers can frolic alongside the ethereal leporidae."
Ooooooo... How deliciously absurd.
/Hedonismbot
Was there not an arcade game in the late 80's that did this, and did it better?
@A25i
NM I just remembered the game, was enclosed.
@A25i No, that wasn't 3D. It was just 2D projected in a fancy way.
A hit of acid is cheaper.
Mines better.
This setup shows different images as you move right & left. It doesn't show different images as you move up & down, though. Still, it's a nice step forward. Right now, generating the 96 different views requires 96x the work of generating one view. However, there's lots of duplicated work that can be factored out with new rendering algorithms.
Follow the pretty 3D blue rabbit Neo.. not that it moves anywhere.. yet
this can be easily done with concave mirrors, and you get HD 3D image with it too.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HPWbP1zvsxA&feature=related
Help me Obiwan, you're my only hope.
Now invent spaceships that can go at the speed of light and something called the force!
@hohums The force is not invented; it is discovered.
Help me Obi-Wan Kanobe, you're my only hope.