Slashdot Mirror
Crystal Technology and 3D TV
deprecated writes "the journal of the american chemical society is running a story on a new crystal technology that could enable 3D-projection television and bring optical computing to consumers sooner. apparently the crystals are able to behave as both a solid and a liquid. neat."
I wonder how long the crystals retain their dual-phase properties. Will your 3D-TV work for weeks? months? years? forever? Remains to be seen...
This is really stupendous news. A hologram is, for all intents and purposes, just a pattern of light and dark bands on a piece of film. Since they've been able to create these patterns on demand at the molecular level (which is necessary because of the size of the visible wavelengths of light), you essentially get a computer generated hologram. Coupled with the switching speeds they are speaking of (billionths of a second) you could easily make fully immersive displays from this. (holodeck anyone? Reminds me of the walls of the houses in Fahrenheit 451).
Only problem is, the processing power needed for such things is enourmous. They'll have to first use this technology in the back-end processors to get the necessary oomph to be able to produce killer apps like immersive tv and such. It'll be an interesting chicken-and-egg problem for them.
No to speak of what kind of camera could make such full motion 360 holograms? I didn't see mention that the crystals also could act as sensors....such a thing would be needed unless you want ALL your programming to be computer-generated images. (now there's an idea...)