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3D Visualization Moves Forward

Posted by michael on from the pick-up-your-glasses-at-7-11-before-the-movie dept.

Chris writes "Showing for the first time at the Society for Information Display (SID) conference in Boston was a three-dimensional display with 100 million volume pixels or "voxels". The Perspecta is a hardware and software combination that projects 3D images inside a 500 mm transparent spherical dome. Images 250 mm in diameter can be seen from a full 360 degrees without goggles, allowing the viewer to walk around the image. It can be used to visualize protein structures and to plan surgical and radiation treatment by locating the exact position of a tumour on an x-ray or mammogram. It could also be used in air traffic control, prototype designing and security scanning of luggage. Perspecta uses Texas Instruments' digital light processor technology and a spinning projection screen, which sweeps the sphere." We've done some previous stories about this globe from Actuality Systems. The trend seems to be toward simulating 3D with high-resolution flat screens, though.

5 of 176 comments (clear)

  1. Another use... by Dick+Click · · Score: 5, Funny

    It can also be used to show to a group of people the design flaw in the Death Star.

  2. Used in security scanning of luggage? by Gannoc · · Score: 4, Insightful
    I read that, and smelled something fishy. That was almost certainly some marketing moron's idea to mention, since I really doubt the company spent years to develop a hugely expensive three dimensional display in order to SCREEN LUGGAGE.

    I despise any company that twists the truth to take advantage of people's fears.

  3. Re:Aaaaaand, why bother. by Riskable · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Ahh, "cross your eyes". Therein lies the problem. You see, there are millions of people all over the world that don't see perfectly out of both eyes. I am one of these people (legally blind in one eye). To us, steroescopic images like the ones you describe will never be more than a blurred picture or static on the screen.

    Also, the angle of view on stereoscopic images is usually very limited. Technologies such as this get around that problem by projecting the image onto a curved surface which provides for more of a "true" 3d-look.

    The real benefit of technolgy such as this is that we're one step closer to the 3D "JAWS" shark that Marty McFly encounters in Back To The Future 2 =)

    --
    -Riskable
    "Those who choose proprietary software will pay for their decision!"
  4. Did this about a year ago... by Uller-RM · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I did a contract coding job similar to this about two years ago - for an exhibit at a tech expo, we rigged up a pair of curved mirrors and a plexiglass semisphere with a hinged hatch. A projector shot a 1024x768 image through the pair of mirrors, producing an image that gave you roughly 270deg FOV horiz and 90deg vertical. Add a joystick and a rudimentary tunnel shooter... :)

    My part of it was hacking up the game engine (Virtools' kit) to render from two in-game viewpoints each frame and distorting the image in a third rendering pass so you'd get a correct image on the screen - lots of optimization, since we were rendering at that resolution two years ago when the Geforce2GTS and 1GHz P3s were the height of consumer technology. That, and some other blocks for the scripting language for level transfers and whatnot.

    (The engine used to be marketed under the name Nemo, now called just Virtools Dev. Not too impressive graphically by today's standards, but it has the most artist-friendly scripting system I've EVER seen. If they strapped a decent rendering tech onto it and some network code, they'd have an absolutely outstanding project on their hands.)

  5. Totally different technologies by SeanAhern · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The trend seems to be toward simulating 3D with high-resolution flat screens, though.

    These are completely different technologies. The first is an "actual" 3D display. The voxels have a true location in 3D space, for instance. People can view it from any angle with no equipment.

    The second appears to be just a large screen. People wear shutter or polarized glasses to send different images to the left and right eyes.

    While the second techology is great, especially for high-resolution display to a single person, it really is annoying when used with multiple people with different locations in space.

    Since there is only one set (left and right) images on the flat screen, only one viewpoint can be chosen. If a group of people is sufficiently far from the screen, or sufficiently close together in the room, it's fine. But if you let the people wander around the room, you start getting perspective problems that really make collaborative viewing troublesome.

    I have a feeling that we will be seeing voxel-based visualization like the one mentioned in this post more and more often. It's just more natural to use.

    As someone who is in the field of high-resolution scientific visualization (that's me on the left), I certainly hope that technology will move in this direction.