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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?
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.
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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--
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.
--
--
I like to watch.
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.
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