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."

Comments

The long path to my living room

[KFury]

I'd be interested in seeing if this goes anyhwere. The article is pretty light on tech and detail, and smacks of those 'terabyte in a sugarcube' articles. It doesn't really give detail on how 'shaping light' can be used for a 3-D TV, or what any of the constraining statistics actually are.

I'd love to see this kind of thing be a reality, but this reads like a small-scale experiment that a reporter caught wind of and extrapolated into a world-changing invention...

Wow that's neat...

[aozilla]

I wonder how it compares to this.

Much more than just TV

[Bowfinger]

From the article:

In addition to the possibility of 3-D TV, the solid-crystal molecules could act as ultrafast switches in optical computers. Stacked in a cube several inches high, they could provide unprecedented storage potential, perhaps many billion times that of current devices. Speed of access would prove dramatically faster than is possible with current computer designs.

Seems like this is a much more significant application than fancier television. We can't even get any momentum behind HDTV, and that technology has been available for years. What are the odds of getting any real progress on 3D-TV in the next 20 years? (Unless this stuff can make hands-on porn - then look for it in Best Buy by Christmas.)

On the other hand, optical switching and high-capacity storage could deliver practical benefits much more quickly. If this is more than another April-fools claim, I would look for the first developments there.

liquid crystals?

[Scrameustache]

apparently the crystals are able to behave as both a solid and a liquid. neat."

WOW! This is revolutionary! This could create such incredible technologies as digital watches and even colour Liquid Crystal Displays! This is new and exciting! Never heard of this before! ;-) Imagine, we could make computer screen that would be flat...or even small portable computing devices with coulour displays...maybe even videogames that could fit in your pockets!

The futur is now indeed!

(Ok, ok, I'll stop now...)

How this applies to holograms

[ThesQuid]

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...)

Holographic printer

[Chayce]

If these crystals do what they claim, although a holographic monitor may be a few years off, a printer that prints 3D images onto holograhic paper may be in stores quickly, all you need is to be able to give every square millimeter, the light it recieves from the virtual object and apply a reference beam thats out of phase. Then we can have holographic pictures taken by a digital cameras using sterioscopic setup, put through a simple 3D extrapolation program. Oh well my spelling sucks, but you get the point.

--I like replies much more than I like Karma