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The Plotter Thickens With Volumetric 3-D Display
Gregg Favalora writes: "I wrote back in October indicating that my firm, Actuality Systems, was working on what we considered to be one of the highest-resolution volumetric 3-D displays ever made. What's cool about it is that it sports over 100 million voxels, color, and an embedded graphics processing architecture with 6 gigabits of RAM. And it'll work off SCSI with many existing applications. Anyhow, the news is that it has started working."
"We are still tweaking the optics and finishing the real-time interface, but photos of the display are now at our website. This is taking place in a startup lab environment, so it's not in a pretty package yet. Rather, it's a work in progress, and we hope to be giving public demos in several months." It may still be vapor, but you can almost see Leia appealing to old Ben Kenobi inside that little plastic dome. Howsabout a test sample, Gregg, so we know it's real?
I'd like a 600rpm rotating camera in my chest to get a picture of my heart. On second thought, a stethoscope would do just fine.
Ford/DERA is working on a 3D monitor that works using MEMS mirrors. Light is projected onto the mirrors, and focused by them onto a point in space so that the image really floats in front of the viewer.. ht m
http://www.dera.gov.uk/html/news/forddera_index
DTI has a 3d monitor, currently available, that uses a lenticular lense placed in front of an LCD monitor. The lens separates the LCD into left and right eye views. The brain puts these together and makes it look like images are floating in front of the monitor.
http://www.dti3d.com
What is this "gigabits of RAM" crap? Do I go to the store to buy a nanohogshead of milk? Perhaps a septapeck or octoliter of beer?
One megabit is 128KB to the rest of us with a clue. One "gigabit" would presumably be 1024 times this figure. 128MB of RAM in a gigabit. 6 gigabits in this display would then be 6*128MB RAM. 768MB of ram, or what typically ships in a low-end server these days.
Next.
Does this make anyone else think of The Secret of NIMH?
Have you guys never seen the movie? Nicodemus uses a mirror that spins up to ultra high rpm's to show Mrs. Brisby what happened to her husband.
http://www.actuality-systems.com/images/
My Freakin Blog
Too bad the fortune tellers can't afford it yet.
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The real world is way ahead of you. :) Ceramic scalpels are already in use.
screw that.
Quake.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
It'd be at least as exciting as the Corn Cam :-)
* And remember, it's spelled N-e-t-s-c-a-p-e, but it's pronounced "Mozilla."
3D porn? Isn't that kind of like, umm, real sex?
Now you too can pay a few thou for a volumetric display, and show a three dimensional, virtual picture of a three dimensional, real, two dollar pot plant.
Way to save money, dudes.
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Anyway, VA's stock price is one-squillionth of the ridiculous peaks. Big deal. Do you get some kind of kick out of seeing that? WTF has VA ever done to you? They support k5 - not to mention sourceforge. Do you want *that* to fall over or something?
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
I think you've misunderstood the technology. The projector is fixed in space and the screen spins; the projected image changes with time to match the spinning of the screen and give a constant (3D-effect) image.
To create a recording system based on this technology, you must find the logical reversal of this playback method, and a spinning camera isn't it! Hypothetically, I think you would have to have the spinning screen occupying the same space as the object being filmed, and then record the light *inside* the screen as it spun.
I suppose you could spin a camera around the object and then use heavy computer munging to generate a signal to drive the projector, but frankly you might as well just use CG to start with... :-)
For a really cool demo, get a camcorder on a spinning mount to match your products, then do a time lapse of a plant germinating..... Why not just use mirror(s)?
I recall an experimental rig in which you viewed a screen reflected on a flexible plastic membrane stretched over the front of a large woofer. The woofer moved the surface alternately concave and convex, imparting a small, but real, range of front-to-back motion. Different images on the screen had to be synchronized with the movement of the reflecting membrane, and the persistance of vision smeared them into a composite 3d image.
Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler. -Albert Einstein
Must a display like this only show voxel graphics, or could it (in theory) be programmed to show polygon-style graphics (as produced by your garden variety 3D gamer card) instead?
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
True, but they are still projecting the final output onto a two dimensional surface as I understand it, its just that this surface is spinning very quickly. So you are still generating 2 dimensional images, you just need to generate 360 (or however many) different 2d images per revolution. So my thought is that perhaps there is a way to form an intelligible 3D display based just on the 360 different 2d polygonal images, rather than having to (render into a voxel array first, and then render the 2d images out of that). But maybe not (except for certain simple images)
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
I think I saw it in the Atomium (in Belgium): there they had a microscope that was completly holographic (floating in the air). You could actually see a magnified sample though it! It was a static holograph (IIRC), but apart from that I found it very impressive. That is the kind of holographs I would like to see computer generated... :)
Keep in mind that even on an ordinary monitor, the "polygon-style display" you see is really composed of millions of little pixels. A volumetric display uses the same raster scan methodology, only in 3 dimensions, hence we get voxels instead of pixels. In terms of how the voxel display is rendered, I imagine it undergoes a process analogous to 2D rendering. The difference is that once the polygons have been transformed into camera space, instead of projecting them into 2-dimensional screen space and then rasterizing them into a 2-dimensional memory buffer, the polygons are simply rasterized into a 3-dimensional memory buffer which is used to drive the volumetric display's refresh.
Ah, yes, I was waiting for someone to make the connection. :)
IMO, that's actually the way to go. We're getting closer all the time to understanding the visual cortex, and it seems a dreadful waste of resources to use a brute-force mechanical display solution when you could simply render an entire scene directly into someone's field of vision by talking to his optic nerve.
Unfortunately, the technology to do that safely and cheaply is probably 70-100 years distant, and there will always be people who don't feel comfortable with it, are allergic to whatever implants they develop, etc.
Unless someone figures out a noninvasive method for doing it, like in Gibson's short, there will probably always be a market for volumetric displays, just as there will always be a market for 2D displays. The two types of display are as fundamentally different as pencils and calligraphy pens.
From what I understand, the display is a flat-panel LCD which spins rapidly. Assuming this is so, this display has a major limitation: it can't be viewed from overhead! As you move your head from the horizontal (head-on) aspect, the display will become increasingly distorted, until you're looking directly down at the display, at which point it won't be showing much of anything. Yech!
All 2-dimensional and most 3-dimensional display technologies are designed with a single user in mind, viewing the display from one vantage point. While this is fine as long as the user (or small group of users) are performing first-person tasks such as writing a paper, browsing the web, or running around killing people with a rocket launcher.
The moment one tries to bring more than one vantage point into perspective, however, the limitations of a flat display make themselves known. Ever noticed how hard it is to achieve really good results with a 3D modelling package? Ever tried to visualize a complex relationship between dozens or hundreds of objects in 3 dimensional space? It's damned hard using today's display technology.
While demand for these displays will be small at first, it will rapidly grow as they become bigger and cheaper. The first widescale application might well be a third-person an arcade, for example a "model flight sim" where two players sit at a table and dogfight with miniature planes flying in the airspace above the table.
From there, the possibilities are limitless: interactive digital theater in the round; architecture, interior design; and landscaping; there are hundreds of awesome applications for this new toy!
It's only disadvantage is the fact that it is, at heart, a giant moving part. So it will tend to be bulky, power hungry, break down frequently and not like vibrations or drops.
The main drawback of Actuality's approach is the rapidly spinning screen. It occurs to me that this same technology isn't all too far from being implemented with immobile, solid-state electronics.
Picture this: a hemisphere of acrylic, crystal or some other clear material, impregnated with millions tiny triplets of red/green/blue light-emitting polymer. The control circuitry for the LEP "pixels" runs vertically throughout the display and is made of the thinnest wires possible, to avoid obscuring any light from escaping the display. (Perhaps the control circuitry is fiber optic, or perhaps it's made of some sort of electrically conductive crystal.)
The display works on the same principal as an Actuality display--only instead of a rotating screen, we do everything logically, sweeping radially around the display and illuminating all the pixels that lie on a given plane or "slice" at the same time, with the proper colors.
This approach would use far less energy than an Actuality display, would have a beautifully high refresh rate, and would have better brightness and clarity.
It might even be possible to get the light-emitting polymer to emit light of a certain polarity, and coat the surface of the display with a material that is polarized so that at any point on the display's outer surface, the only light allowed to pass directly through that point is light that was emitted in phase with the "slice" which runs approximately parallel to the tangent of that point. Don't despair if this sounds like gibberish. What it comes down to is an ultra-crisp display and ludicrously high refresh rates.
The polarized-light technology is probably impractical, but we should have the manufacturing technology for the basic display within 20 years, maybe sooner if this nanotechnology hype ever goes anywhere.
This started out as Gregg's senior project. It was a bit more crude and was monochromatic then, but it did run almost constantly for my senior year ('98) looping through a few different images including a nice 3D Homer Simpson head. Putting aside the tech aspects of this story for a second, I would just like to comment on how nice it is to see an engineer bringing his own idea to fruition in his own company.
Why use SCSI instead of AGP? Hmm.. Maybe cuz it's easier to get SCSI cables than AGP cables ;-)
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Forgot: Due to the principle it's based on the display couldn't display anything non transparent. Every voxel actually glows, so you can't display something like a house and expect the walls to hide what's inside, so you could only see inside through the windows. Everything will shine through. The same problem should apply to the new display.
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This only works for 3D projections onto 2D screens, because there you know from where the viewer watches the image and therefore can determine which parts have to be hidden.
memomo: free web based language trainer DE-EN-ES-FR-IT
Back when virtual reality was the future (late '80s), TI had a similar display. It was a fast rotating helix made of a transparant material. Due to the rotation every position inside the dome this thing rotated in was "filled" with material only once during every circle. If you fired a laser at that position when it was filled, it would glow in green or red, depending on the laser. And naturally only that position would glow, because the rest of the dome was empty right then.
So by rotating and timing the laser one could display volumetric data. Resolution was very low (a cube that occupied 1/5 of the whole height of the dispay consisted of about five voxels in each direction), but it looked pretty cool anyway.
Price was somewhere between $10K and $50K. TI intended to build a large version for air traffic controllers, so they could walk around a virtual sky in a dome and "see" the planes. Never heard of it again.
The display by Actuality Systems seems to use the same basic principles: rotation and timed illumination. I hope that this time we'll really see these things on the/a market.
And yes, I want one.
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If you follow the test pattern link you might think this whole thing was a hoax just to get /. to post a story about AYBABTU
http://Lenny.com
Or to put it simply, they put a magnet around an electron beam and scan it so fast across a phosphor screen you can't tell it's a point on the phosphor anymore.
Please explain... I'm confused.
Umm... It was a book. "Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH". I guess I didn't remember any spinnie-things in the book, so either I forgot about that part, or (more likely) they added it in the movie version.
I think you're talking about Sega's "Time Traveller".
It just used a parabolic mirror to make the image float there.
me
voxel = volume element = one pint in 3D
So thats what they've been serving me at the pub!
Barkeep, A round of voxels!
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The million mirrors thingy is already out--it's called DSP and it's what most projectors these days use.
obl. disc. site is hosed, so I'm speculating:
You'll need a vacuum too. To get 50hz, you'll need a 300rpm rotation. If it's a helix, you'll be stuck with a gigantic propellor, and if it is flat, you have a centripetal pump. So you need vacuum.
(side note: couldn't we just use one of those vapor-trail detectors and two or three low power lasers to acheive 3-d vector display? The idea being that neither beam would be powerful enough on its own to ionize the vapor, but at their intersection, they would combine to have enough power -- or do we run into the limitation that you can't add quanta?)
Also, both display technolgies have the drawback of being non-occluding. You can't display solid objects, because the front face will be transparent, letting the back shine through.
This will of course be fine for air traffic control, and for things like displaying MRI scans doctors are already proficient at reading layered data, but it will be a hassle for many potential uses.
Of course, the ability to select what is displayed will help.
Uh, nope.. a 'voxel' is a point or some higher-dimensional sample of some volume.
Voxels are somtimes thought of as a cubic volume - i.e. the point sample is linearly interpolated in each of the X,Y,Z axes out to some threshold value determined by some means, often the density of that voxel. This is what you are talking about.
However, Voxels are also often represented using a technique called 'spatting', which is indeed, simply drawing a set of (usually semi-transparent) sprites - one per sample, on screen in back-to-front order. This is what the previous poster is talking about.
Voxels can also be represented as isosurfaces based on interpolated density values, vector fields, multiple 2D planes generated by 'slicing' the volume as well as others.
Voxels are certainly not inherently cubic in nature, and stating the only representation of a sampled 3D volume is a set of little cubes is mistaking the definition of a voxel for a rendering method.
I gots ta ding a ding dang my dang a long ling long
3D displays like these are old and how practical are they? I saw one of these like 10 years ago on Beyond 2000. Why move around a display to look around an object when you could just move around virtually with a mouse?
Nice for advertising, to catch peoples attention, but what else?
War crimes, torture, lies, illegal spying... Would someone give Bush a blowjob, already, so he can be impeached?
Unfortunately many modern radars don't report the altitude of an aircraft.
Seeing the altitude wouldn't really help anyway. A place that's 10km up and 300km (ground distance) away wouldn't display well.
3d Technology Laboratories was demoing their 3D Volumetric display at ACM1. Their approach is to shine 2 different wavelength lasers through a glass or plastic cube (dopant revealed only under NDA). Where they cross, voila. A pinpoint of light. The demo display is a 2-inch glass cube. See the website for pictures.
For a really cool demo, get a camcorder on a spinning mount to match your products, then do a time lapse of a plant germinating. This would allow you to do a frame every second or two in high resolution, making the capture process easy, then you can avoid having to do any hidden surface removal for playback. You could also do the math and do all that to compress it for the finished demo.
It would be a VERY cool, high resolution demo that wouldn't be replicable on ANY other type of display out there.
Ok, get a camcoder, a pivot point, some potting soil and seeds... and make me a very cool demo. (I want to see this if you actually do it).
--Mike--
haha
No doubt, what an idiot. Their site has been /. since 11PM last night, and it still is slowed to a crawl.
Someone you trust is one of us.
I don't want my FPS'er to get too much more real looking, anymore and it will start too look a bit too much like the real thing. (IMnsHO) Can you imagine 3-D 'victims'?? Thats getting to be a bit much... Not that I think that this ubercool new display is a bad thing or that it is aimed at the gamer market, but it will trickle down eventually...
If you voted for Nader, THIS IS ALL YOUR FAULT!!
(Note: I was hoping for a +1 funny with my original comment, but I guess nobody can figure out I was being facetious. Yes, even though they really are just a 3D extension of the "floating clock" concept, these displays are actually a very clever idea. "Makes me yawn" was a joke.)
I think your predictions about 3D UIs are a little over-reaching. 3D interfaces have been around in research labs for years (using OpenGL images on 2D displays), and the big problem is not displaying the images, it's giving the user an easy way to manipulate the images in 3-space. (Your example of using the scroll wheel to represent depth sounds pretty clumsy, really.) The key to 3D UIs rests not with the display, but with the input device, and that's not an easy problem to solve at all. Just look at all the spiffy new 3D-gaming input devices that constantly fail to catch on. It's hard to build a workable 3D input device, and until someone does, volumetric displays will likely remain rather passive devices instead of interactive ones.
Free Hans!
I'd like to see an actual 3D image with no glass case and no rotating display screen. Now that would be something. This just makes me yawn. A neat toy ... big deal.
Free Hans!
I.e., make this a floor model. Generate the image in a dome hidden in a cabinet, then use parabolic mirrors to float the image above the cabinet for a free-floating image.
a previous post mention that the screen was spinning at 600rpm. A glass plate spinning at 600rpm would have to be very well balanced. if it was at all off centered then the thing would mostlike fall over and start spinning around until it broke. I imagine this thing is bolted quite well to their desk.
A rabbit in the hand is worth 4 in the cage
And get your hands, or *something else* whacked by the screen that is spinning at 600rpm.
echo $email | sed s/[A-Z]//g | rot13
you can see that they use one of TI's DSPs to run the unit
I think you're reading too much into a mere coincidence. TI are big in DSP's, and they've just happened to buy from the same vendor who used to also make a similar product.
Mayo Clinic already has a pretty cool machine for making 3-D x-ray movies. In fact, they have had it for about 20 years. They call it a dynamic spatial reconstructor. It used to take days of supercomputer processing to extract the movie from the raw data.
All your base are belong to us?
/. on this thing too!
:-)
Hey! You can read
Now I'm impressed.
sig fault
The latest AGP 4X boasts a maximum data-transfer rate of 1,066MBps seems agp is much faster, they probably have their reasons though
read the whole thing!
Or you could save your money, get drunk and bang Sarcasta like the rest if us. Take the money you saved and invest in RISC hardware, or plastic surgery. (You can always find a use for plastic surgery. When in doubt, add five inches to your penis.)
Remember: even Windex won't get semen off an LCD.
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I like to watch.
Please respond quickly or I will take my offer to kuro5hin. Unfortunately, I do not think they will accept. Darn their scruples and lack of commercial filth!
Yours truly,
Vinnie Vendor
Director of Lies^H^H^H^HMarketing
Evil, Inc.
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I like to watch.
Maybe something involving waves in fluid like Scophony would work.
I think (without knowing the toy in question) that yours is just relying on persistence of vision as the ring goes round. You can buy (or build) little clocks consisting of a column of LEDs on the end of a stick (or pendulumn), and as you wave the stick around, the LEDs change their display. Persistence of vision makes you see the brighter LED image for longer, so it looks like the message is written in the air. I think there's a version called the SpaceWriter.
:-)
Point is, with the SpaceWriter system the LED has to physically go through the location where you want the pixel. That's the difference - Actuality's one uses projection to do it, so the LEDs stay fixed in the base of the unit. If you had a pillar of LEDs flying around, (a) it'd be difficult to get it to move fast enough, and (b) it'd get in the way of viewing the image from all sides.
They're definitely missing a trick anyway by not using a version of the Princess Leia film!
Grab.
The heart of Actuality's display technology is a high-speed image projection system which illuminates a swiftly rotating proprietary screen. As the screen sweeps out a cylindrical volume, the projector sends out a sequence of 2-D "image slices." These slices, when computed properly and projected in the correct sequence, serve to create a volume-filling 3-D image. Your persistence of vision does the rest.
Here's how the system works in a deeper level of detail: your application (say, an MCAD system) provides the Actuality display with data via the Actuality API. This geometry information is rasterized and placed into a three-dimensional matrix of memory in the display unit. A high-speed projection system rapidly flips through the 3-D memory in a series of 2-D steps, which we call slices. These slices, when computed properly and selected at the proper times, perceptually combine into a sharp, volume-filling, true 3-D image.
I have no pants and I must scream
hrm from 90 voxels, to 100 million. in about 6 months. can we expect a 10 billion voxel display for chrismas? :P
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"and dear god does this website suck now." -- CmdrTaco
I don't know what you were trying to say, but reading it made my head hurt :P
Voxels don't have anything more to do with sprites then pixels do. And there is no reason you couldn't make a sprite out of Voxels the same way you could out of pixels, it would just be a 3d one
To clarify:
A pixel is a picture-element, one of the squares of color that make up a digital image. If you have a 640x480 picture, then you have a matrix of 640 pixels by 480 pixels arranged in a grid, each with a specific color value.
A voxel is a volume element, instead of squares of color, you have cubes, and you build your picture the same way you would build something out of legos.
A sprite is an image that moves around the screen programicaly... Like a video game character, in fact, the term 'sprite' is used almost exclusively when talking about video games. A sprite can be a picture, (like a picture of Mario) or a volume (imagine a 3d Mario built out of blocks). It really doesn't matter.
A Voxel is not a set of sprites stuck together, there is no version of the term that means this, and whoever told that to you was totally wrong.
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"and dear god does this website suck now." -- CmdrTaco
[shrug] I considered it a dumb way to attack a dumb sig, myself. Your mileage may, of course, vary.
...what I really want is an atomic vector plotter.
I know where I can get one, but I just can't get myself to enjoy Vogon poetry that much, no matter how hard I try...
With the patient inside an MRI machine, they'd have to use unconventional surgical instruments: anything metallic would be really hard to control in the magnetic field. Scalpels made of obsidian?
thats just sick
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It is not animated yet, but soon will be. Bandwidth is the limiting factor and a SCSI connection should provide the required bandwidth to do animation. The globe itself is plastic and larger than a basketball. The image fills up a volume the size of a basketball inside. The image is best viewed with the lights off but it can be seen easily with the lights on. The brightness will increase over the next few months as more effecient projector lamps and mirrors are used.
I am left wondering if they have taken into account the dangers of this product.
What happens if a device has a critical failure and the mirror shatters? Would I ever be glad to have a piece of glass thrown out of the machine at high speeds at my neck. Now that would sure be a 3d thrill..
Reality Bytes
[pink beam of light]
Not as good as this one, though. Oh. My. God.
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NO TOUCH MONKEY!
Uh... There's a chair in the background of one of the pics. Take a look. The thing is probably two feet in diameter (.6M for you metric people). z
I must say. But I was wondering, how big is this thing? From looking at the pictures there was no measurements, nor anything to base a scale on. Anyone know the dimensions?
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#nohup cat
Memory: 6 Gbits DDR SDRAM
How much did _that_ cost?!?!?!?!
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#nohup cat
I'd love to see how this looks in action. When it switches between images as the projection screen turns, does it instantly flick from one image to the next, making sharp edges to the voxels, or does it or can it blend between the images? Maybe it's too small and fast to perceive the difference, anyway. Also, the 3d resolution, or density of voxels will decrease the further from the centre of the fishbowl you get, because a point on the projection screen is moving further between images. How does this affect the 3d image? I'm assuming it's projecting a uniform 2d image.. or is it?
That was a 2-d image projected off the surface by the mirror mentioned in the last comment. Looks kinda cool, but the image gets a bit distorted and there's no real 3rd dimension to it. IIRC, it was a pretty crappy game too. You can get the same optical effect from that table-top mirage thingy, the one you put some coins or something in the bottom of. The image is projected above the device by a pair of parabolic mirrors. Here's the first link that I got from Google. There's an explanation a bit more than halfway down the page.
Bugrit! Millenium hand and shrimp!
Well, it is NOT free standing out in the open air. and it is not animated.
It is contained inside a glass sphere. Maybe the size of a basketball, or smaller. The images are of a small section of a DNA strand, roughly one full twist. The quality of the image is similar to a nicely shadowed but obviously computer rendered diagram in 3D (well duh!) It is definitely not photograde, although that by itself should not be a problem.
The image is shown glowing, but it is in a darkened space, so probably it will not be ready for daylight presentations for a while.
I am amazed that it is done at all, although it will be a while before it progresses beyond the novelty stage.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
shouldn't it be: "the thick plottens" ?
Sorry, I couldn't resist...
(I'm one of the founders.)
The 3-D display is a diffuse sheet that rotates at 600 rpm; as it spins, 2-D images that correspond to "slices" of a 3-D dataset are projected onto the sheet.
Because the screen is thin, and because of the way it's mounted, (and also, believe it or not, because of the spacing between your eyes) you see a very compelling 3-D image regardless of where you stand. Even from above! It's actually quite cool. But I'm biased, I suppose...
Gregg Favalora, CTO
Hmmm... could have been, I was in Jr. High school at the time (and not an avid reader of /. yet).
Kurdt
Kurdt
I'm not anti-social. Just pro-technology.
That was sarcasm. You could tell by our user id that we "joined" slashdot at about the same, assuming each of these accounts are our first. Although given what time we're each posting, I'll just assume we're tired. Btw, I'm guessing we're roughly the same age, I go to Wash U.
Kurdt
Kurdt
I'm not anti-social. Just pro-technology.
I saw another version of a 3D display in an arcade years ago, attached to a machine that cost something like $5 to play and seemed a pretty simple game. And this was back in the days when all games cost 25c. Next time I went back to that arcade the machine was gone. Basically, (especially in light of the recent advances in flat-screen technology) will I be able to afford one of these before my kids are my age?
Kurdt
Kurdt
I'm not anti-social. Just pro-technology.
What you say!
Of course, it interesting, but .....
We work with nimbers of this old idea: holography screens, volumetric, parallax barrier, microlenses etc. etc. Results: or very expencive or bad quality or restricted type of images. For example, only transparent images for volumetric type display are possible. Another side is acceptability for existing entertainment industry (no great changing for game coding, 3d chips architecture, monitors production process)
Only new idea to change pure optic scheme to optics + mathematics give us good results (see in http://3d.neurok.com
I'm sorry, this borders on being really funny, and considering thread is almost on topic....umm haha
Guttermouth is a really good band.
These displays are still not the "ultimate" in 3D because they aren't true 3D displays. Yes, they give an excellent sense of depth, but they cannot emulate real world images of most objects. The technical reason is that the light generated or reflected by an object can only be properly represented by 4 dimensions of data (not counting wavelength, time and external light sources), but these displays can only really produce 3. To put it in laymans terms, these displays can only represent additively transparent (glowing) objects. You cannot visualize opaque objects properly. This is still useful for scientific visualization, medical imaging, etc... but not all that useful for common real-world applications.
someone's been reading Gibson shorts.... :)
Perhaps it is true that this 3-D plotter will become a rage with porno sites but the Designer industry is going to equally benefit and make use of this technology. With designer I mean all those industries whose main stay is designing, which would include Clothes, Architechture, Home and Office Interiors, Machine designing etc.
There's always sufficient, but not always at the right place nor for the right folks.
Check out the Harvard Medical School Surgical Planning Lab for instance. They're working on (among other things) a system that allows doctors to perform surgery while the patient is inside an MRI machine, so that the surgeons can literally see what's under their knife before they make the next incision. (Right now it's done on a CRT, eventually they want some sort of HUD overlay.) Very, very cool stuff. If unenclosed holographic projection ever happens, they'll be first in line to use it.
News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters? Like hell.
Yup...you guessed it... 3-D Pr0n IS ON THE WAY!!!!...
"A microprocessor... is a terrible thing to waste." --
"A microprocessor... is a terrible thing to waste." --
GeneralEmergency
...surely it's a good idea, but they're still at the point of a magic lantern...
-- There are two kind of sysadmins: Paranoids and Losers. (adapted from D. Bach)
I'm curious, 'cuz I have a "Saturn-5" electronic toy sitting behind me which has a motorized plastic ring with 10 red LED's around it, which flicker as the ring spins. By playing with the timing parameters (2 knobs) I can make various spherical patterns appear. Is this in violation?
What if I replaced the ring with a circuit board with ~200 LEDs on it (I think Radio Shack has all three colors now)? Although communicating with 200 spinning LEDs would be a challenge in itself .. maybe a spinning mirror would be better .. How much of this is already patented?
Oh, well, back to work..
-B
Not that this wasn't entirely predictable.
It's interesting that they made such a big announcement that their product actually works.. ;)
It's even funnier to see what their 2D Test Pattern is. ;)
That will be nice when they actually get it out and there are a few advances in memory. Unfortunately, it will probably not have the cool sort of holographic effects that they had in Star Wars and Star Trek.
But I bet that the folks who do military-grade radars will love it. Imagine being able to view the exact 3D position of an aircraft instead of just looking at the overhead view.
It's just odd to see that they are using SCSI to do the interfacing. SCSI's a lot slower than the AGP port, and you are transfering several hundered times the data.. ;)
Gentoo Sucks
Will I be able to get my X-Wing missions on this thing?
I was more thinking of a just a 3d render of the Admiral giving me the missions :)
Holography also have other uses; they enable radiologists to interact with the data that have been collected by scanners and they may facilitate the production of "what if' images which some surgeons have found useful in surgical planning. Programs have concentrated on the parts of the body and the kinds of conditions (i.e., tumors, trauma, and vascular abnormalities) that are commonly examined with CT and MR scanners.
Studies were designed to determine if the digital holography systems would allow diagnosis of conditions that are extremely difficult or impossible to detect with existing technology; provide for more accurate and comprehensive diagnosis and understanding of conditions that are difficult characterize fully with existing technology; increase the radiologist's confidence in the diagnosis made; reduce the time required to arrive at a diagnosis; facilitate communication of relevant information; improve surgical planning; and allow for more fully informed patient consent to treatment.
Sure its a cheesy website but it has some pretty useful information on the subject.
privacy 101
360 degrees of Karma
Peeking around the corner by looking in the other side of this device, instead of peeking your marine around the corner.
Checking what monster is just beyond the door in single player mode.
Shame on you! For shame!
I am for the complete Trantorization of Earth.
Ehh, keep your pants on. Remember that the images are insubstantial.
I am for the complete Trantorization of Earth.
Ugh, all that high tech just to play an illogical air-flight simulator in space?!?!?
I am for the complete Trantorization of Earth.
-Vess
What the hell are voxels? Sounds like something from H2G2. Seriously though, if everyone gets 3d displays how long will it be before rubber doll jokes change over to holometric doll jokes? Man can pervert any invention. ;)
I assume they are talking about real 3d here, not just a new kind of monitor. Correct me if I'm wrong.
But Yogi, the RIAA won't like that.
For those of you wondering just how the heck this thing works - it uses a (really fast) conventional 2-D projector and a very complex array of lenses and mirrors to project a constantly changing image onto a 2-dimensional translucent screen that rotates at 600 rpm. By changing the image as the screen rotates, the illusion of a 3-D object is created.
More technical info (with pictures) can be found here and a shot of the screen while it's not moving can be seen here.
main(c,r){for(r=32;r;) printf(++c>31?c=!r--,"\n":c<r?" ":~c&r?" `":" #");}
...that it is only a matter of time before one of the developers scans his wang into this thing (if they haven't done it alread).
pr0n - keeping monitor glass spotless since 1981.
Awwww yeah, Levon. Come on an' lemme sit on this puddin'.
pr0n - keeping monitor glass spotless since 1981.
... a kick-ass MP3 visualization plugin for ANY of CmdrTaco's MP3 players.
(just couldn't resist; I was also thinking about asking for a "Beowulf Cluster of these")
/var/run/twitter.sock is a twitter socket puppet.
--
"May the forces of evil become confused on the way to your house"
--
"May the forces of evil become confused on the way to your house"
-George Carlin
It seems much more appealing to me.
I have tried the system where you wear two polaroid glasses with different polarizations. That's not as good in theory as in practice, as inevitably there comes some light through the left lens that should only have come through the right and vice versa. Gives you a real headache.
xkcd is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
Now all they need to do is to fit an ashtray and a drinksholder to the bastard, and I'd buy one for my house.
Fantazein sells a suspended image toy for $50-$100 in science toy stores. It is a row of LEDs on a metronome rod. You can program up to five lines of messages including the clock time. The text appears to float in thin air. And there is a another version where the LED rod sweeps out a 360-degree disk.
Until 1980 the predominant graphics devices
were based on vectors. The premier vendor was
Tecktronix and graphics language was GKS.
These were descendents of oscilloscopes.
Vectors couldn't do shaded polygons very well.
The oscilloscope would start running into capacity
and speed problems for very compilcated line
images. About 1980, the cost of a megabyte of
screen memory fell below $20,000, allowing
affordable raster/pixel displays.
The alternatives are legion.
Besides holography mentioned a couple times already,
there are the concave mirror devices.
This is an extension of the "floating penny"
novelty device. There was an arcade video game
using this in the 1980s.
Another display is the 3D phospher screen,
just like in conventional TV. It is a cubical
stack of phospher screens. Phosphers are
illuminated by an intersecting pair of scanning
lasers. This device required new materials
of very transparent screen stacks and laser
triggered luminescing chemicals. A Stanford grad
student built a half-inch cube version of this
device in the mid-1990s. Then it went into
news oblivion.
Recently with decent computing power and graphics we've been able to have rotatable, light-shaded etc molecules onscreen with stuff like Rasmol etc, but it is still quite hard to get a feel for them.
Ultimately what would be nice is StarTrek-type hologram projection (that you can see and feel) but just being able to realtime manipulate a proper 3d image is the next best thing.
Now, let's see if I can con, er, persuade the dept to buy one of these for demonstrations ;0). This is an ideal 'gather round and watch' piece of equipment for labs and lectures in many disciplines.
"Don't get mad, get a monkey!"