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Disney Research's latest tech will accurately 3D print your mullet
Printing in three dimensions allows for a ton of really cool (and life-saving) stuff, but one area it apparently hasn't conquered just yet is realistically reproducing human hair. The masterminds at Disney Research think they have a solution for that conundrum. Instead of trying to capture individual strands of someone's coif, the team is taking a similar approach to that of Michelangelo, and attempting to capture an overall "essence" of a person's hairstyle by fitting it on a bust like a helmet. And while the applications for most of what Walt's science department cooks up are a bit ambiguous, it seems pretty likely this tech'll be found in the myriad souvenir shops lining The Magic Kingdom. Disney says that the ultimate goal is to make more realistic (and possibly nightmare-inducing) figurines that accurately capture the subject's personality. What's more, the outfit has pointed out that it's even capable of accurately capturing facial hair. I might be a tad biased, but here's to hoping that means sideburns too.
Glasses-free 3D projector offers a cheap alternative to holograms
Holograms are undoubtedly spiffy-looking, but they're not exactly cheap; even a basic holographic projector made from off-the-shelf parts can cost thousands of dollars. MIT researchers may have a budget-friendly alternative in the future, though. They've built a glasses-free 3D projector that uses two liquid crystal modulators to angle outgoing light and present different images (eight in the prototype) depending on your point of view. And unlike some 3D systems, the picture should remain relatively vivid -- the technology uses a graphics card's computational power to preserve as much of an image's original information (and therefore its brightness) as possible.
