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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?
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.
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.
memomo: free web based language trainer DE-EN-ES-FR-IT
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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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--
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!
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I like to watch.
Maybe something involving waves in fluid like Scophony would work.
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
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"
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
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
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?" `":" #");}
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