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High-res Volumetric 3D Display Prototype
Gregg Favalora wrote in to plug his company Actuality Systems, Inc., which is working on a 90 voxel (8 color!) volumetric display. Could be useful for stuff like air traffic control. Or playing that chess game that we saw in Star Wars. Its not even a finished prototype, I'm actually posting this 'cuz I'm curious what uses people could think of for something like this.
Picture the file system directory spread out across 3d space
:-)
"It's a UNIX system!"
Nik.
Amen.
Take a look at some of the pictures on this page to see some examples of the kind of images I'm talking about. Or, if you have some spare time, download IBM's open source viz program, OpenDX, and play with it (warning: time consuming business, this isn't your typical end user app.)
One of the benefits of a volumetric display is being able to move your head or body and actually see the object from a different angle. Humans are intuitively programmed to be able to understand the 3D objects that we interact with in real life, and cues like what happens when you move your head are important. Dealing with a 2D representation of a 3D object, some of this is inevitably lost.
For a concrete example of this, run a game like Doom and position your character near a window. If you move your (real) head from side to side, the view outside the window doesn't change. This isn't realistic, and gives a misleading impression of the relationships between objects on the screen. When the objects are unfamiliar ones, like the innards of a virus, this makes a difference to one's intuitive grasp of the object's structure.
What people seem to be forgetting (or perhaps you didn't even read the article?) is the way the image is created. There's a screen rotating at 600RPM about a vertical axis, and the projector sticks an image on it every 1/20 second. You can't step inside it or reach inside with VR gloves to move stuff. In short, it's a 3D image, *NOT* a hologram.
There are some drawbacks to the design. First, at a certain size, the air resistance at the outer edges of the whirling screen will necessitate stronger materials, larger motors, etc. and it will very quickly become a big, noisy beast. Secondly, unless there's some very careful tinkering with the projection equipment, the voxels at the center are updated as often as the ones on the outside, resulting in squished (about the axis) voxels at the center and elongated ones along the outside. To make each voxel the same size, the refresh rate has to be proportional to the distance from the central axis.
I'm not saying it's not excellent tech, but it will be expensive to make it stable, properly proportioned, and quiet.
High-speed Road Trip (18.000KPH)
Yep, that's 90 megavoxels. But before you get too excited, that's about a 600x600x250 pixel display. In 8 colors. So what we have here is the first 3D EGA monitor. :)
You need truly frightening numbers of voxels to do anything really interesting. I've done heat transfer simulations that crippled a SGI supercomputer for only a 30 cm tall by 50 cm wide tank filled with fluid. Shame the oil tanks we *wanted* to simulate were 10 meters high and 15 meters across...
Genocide Man -- Life is funny. Death is funnier. Mass murder can be hilarious.
will provide the highest resolution volumetric 3-D imagery in the world. Multicolored images, comprised of over 90 million 3-D pixels called "voxels," will seem to float within its transparent viewing dome. And I thought the Chess game was originally on WestWorld. There's also a concept graphic of the display dome on the company's homepage.
Work for Change & GET PAID!
We already have this technology.
It's called girls.. and my god, have you seen the resolution?! Wooooooohhhh says Neo.
Moderators need an additional choice: "Karma Whore" for people who cut-and-paste articles as their comments!
... Many Bothans died to bring us this information. :)
AHHHHHHH! I'm burning with goodness again!
- Reakk, Sluggy Freelance
Just a quick note from one of the founders of the 3-D display firm.
Seems to be some confusion about the resolution of the device we're working on. The 3-D display creates imagery by projecting onto a rotating screen; it projects (at least) 200 2-D images, each of a resolution of approx. 768 x 768. Persistence of vision fuses all of these "slices" into a 3-D image.
Note that the images are stacked radially, like slicing a pizza - not linearly, like a deck of cards.
I hope you enjoy the site... We're working hard over here to have something ready for demonstration; we'll try to put actual photographs on the web some day soon.
Gregg Favalora