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The one at 3dmedia.com seems like it has much more resolution and seems better there used to be pictures on that page but now there isn't, it still looks interesting though.

Cool aspects: instead of needing a physical object to make a hologram you can now use a transparent LCD screen. You can also make your hologram any size you want because instead of a single exposed but if film the hologram is made from little 2"x2" tiles.

Misleading aspects of the story: This is not Star Wars technology come to life. Neither Princess Leia nor Queen Amidala will be hovering in mid-air begging someone for help. There's no motion involved in these holograms unless successive tiles have an animated image. The only way you'll get animation of any sort is the same way you get it out of the baseball cards printed with the plastic ribbing. Each viewing angle gives you a different instance frame. These images do not hover in mid-air either, their focal point is behind the surface of the view window.

The sort of volumetric projection in Star Wars is not possible without some super fancy technology to bend light rays once they hit a certain point in space. You need something for the photons to hit and change direction in, like glass. The people at Dimensional Media (www.3dmedia.com) have a system like this. They take a bunch of 2D slices and project them at high speed onto a piece of glass. Each of the 20 or so slices they use is a slightly different perspective on the 3D image. These are run through a beam splitter and projected onto a set of mirrors that projects onto a glass plate. The image seems to float behind the glass plate and as you move from side to side you're seeing one of the slightly different perspective slices. It is cool technology that might be getting somewhere because DMA has won a couple awards for their technology and got a research grant from somebody in January. I don't work for them or anything I've just run across lots of articles about them in the past 6 years and looked into their technology when I began to research building a home made volumetric projection system. While Zebra Imaging has a cool tech for static holograms I'm much more interested in realtime volumetric projection. My interest in holography lasted about as long as the power supply for my HeNe laser.

Sort of like what Dimensional Media is doing? :)

What I want are more photos and videos to woo the consumer in me!

Try http://www.3dmedia.com/video/360a.html

Click me for the video!

For those who are interested:

Dimentional Media Associates is at http://www.3dmedia.com Its a flash site.
The model M-40DV under products seems to do video.

Hope that clears some things up.

Cruise over to Dimensional Media's website and check out the HyperCube 3D monitor in the R&D tab (no pics, unfortunately). The best quote from the description: "can add a tactile force feedback interface." You will actually be able to roughly feel the object as well! The applications for this kind of tech are endless, from surgery to 3D modeling to CAD to entertainment (gotta feed the pornhounds), etc. I'd say this isn't even possible yet, except for the fact that hundreds have seen it in person at Comdex. Love to know what their products go for, even though I'll never actually be able to afford them. I just can't help but imagine what computing will be like in 20 years (maybe even sooner!) when these babies are commonplace and operating systems are designed in 3D; you'll grab a file and drop it in a folder, literally! :)

Deo

Dimensional Media
22 W. 19th St., 2nd Fl.
New York, NY 10011 USA
http://www.3dmedia.com/ phone: 212-620-4100
e-mail: info@3dmedia.com