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The Plotter Thickens With Volumetric 3-D Display

Posted by timothy on from the that's-not-a-holodeck-mate dept.

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?

3 of 138 comments (clear)

  1. This needs a cool demo... CGI isn't good enough. by ka9dgx · · Score: 5
    If you can get a rotating camera system to do the 3d source for this puppy, imagine the level of detail a movie could have. You could loop through an event, say a heartbeat (from MRI data), and look at it from every concieveable angle. This wouldn't be as realistic as output from a video source, but it would suffice for showing medical uses.

    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--

  2. holography in Medical use by deran9ed · · Score: 5

    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
  3. An Explanation by Spy+Hunter · · Score: 5

    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?" `":" #");}