Star Wars-like Holograms

jeffy124 writes: "Business 2.0 has an article up about Ford's use of holograms during vehicle development. It's almost exactly like that scene in the original Star Wars where R2D2 ran a movie of Princess Leia saying 'Help me Obi Wan.' Basically, Ford uses the system during development to get a look at the car and various parts without needing to construct a full prototype. The image is a 3-D projection and hovers just above the floor, allowing the user to walk around the 'vehicle,' getting a look at it from all angles. I can picture the pr0n jokes now!"

Comments

Translation

[quintessent]

It's almost exactly like that scene in the original Star Wars where R2D2 ran a movie of Princess Leia saying 'Help me Obi Wan.'

Not really. It's a sheet of film, like the holograms you get on Windows CDs or ones you buy at the toy store. The difference is it's bigger, a lot better quality, and they can create it from a rendered (rather than real) object.

Contrary to what the Slashdot description implies, there's no real-time anything involved here.

They can't project Leia yet

[steveha]

This technique is a way to quickly make a hologram, on film. You can develop the film and view the hologram.

What's cool is that they have figured out how to use an LCD screen to computer-generate the 3D holograms. Until now, to make a hologram, you needed a physical object to work from.

I'd be interested to know how long it takes to make one of these holograms. If they could get their equipment fast enough to make, say, 24 holograms per second, perhaps they could leave out the film part and just generate moving holograms in realtime. I suspect it's a lot slower than that right now.

steveha

Re:They can't project Leia yet

[POPE Mad Mitch]

Until now, to make a hologram, you needed a physical object to work from.

Not true, for a number of years there have been techniques for creating entirely computer generated holograms. The biggest problem so far is getting a printer with a high enough resolution to do this directly. Photo reduction is generally used to compensate for this.

However this technology might not (yet) scale well to commercial uses, the computation required seems to be pretty large.

A quick google should find you plenty of examples.

Re:They can't project Leia yet

[CoderByBirth]

My guess is that developing the hologram takes about as much time as developing a regular photograph.

There are two kinds of holograms; the more expensive and complicated kind, and the less expensive and complicated and also less useful kind.

The less expensive and complicated kind (there is probably a name for this, involving something about light diffraction) requires two laserbeams of equal wavelength and phase, one to light up the object, and one as a reference laser for the film. To display the hologram, it needs to be lit by the reference laser in the exact same angle and wavelength.
I have actually made a hologram of this kind myself.

The more complicated and expensive kind of hologram does not require a reference laser to display it, but is harder to make. I'd be surprised if it took less than an hour to make a holographic image using this technique, so realtime cinema is out of the question. Also, I don't see how this stuff could be projected.

No, you can't walk around it...

[Richard Kirk]

'It's almost exactly like that scene in the original Star Wars where R2D2 ran a movie of Princess Leia saying 'Help me Obi Wan.'

I'm afraid not. The image does not move and you can't walk very far around it. Where the reflected beam and the reference beam interfere, you get the same distribution of light you might get off the original 3-D object. However, the image only extends to the edge of the holographic plate. Wander around to the front of the car and it disappears. Go around to the other side of where the car ought to be, and it stays gone, because there is nothing solid bouncing the light back.

Is this a real bit of kit, and if so, why don't they show a photograph of it?

Company behind it

[jrest]

Zebra Imaging is the company behind it all. Might be slashdotted already...

Re:How's that supposed to work???

[paganizer]

I could have SWORN that this had already been done right; I remember reading about a big fish tank-ish structure, filled with liquid in which phosphorescent particles were suspended, and multiple red, green and blue lasers above and below the tank, intersect 2 lasers at a certain point and that point glows red, green, blue, whatever, the particles glowed for a few milliseconds, long enough so that when the proper 3d shape was traced, it generated a 3d image.
I recall the frame rate sucked, something like 1 per 2 seconds.
Anyone else recall this? it was maybe 4 years ago, had something to do with a japanese car company, I think... I've done a relatively complete search, came up with nothing.
If I just dreamed it, consider this trademarked prior art.

All I got was this lousy t-shirt

[Graymalkin]

Cool aspects: instead of needing a physical object to make a hologram you can now use a transparent LCD screen. You can also make your hologram any size you want because instead of a single exposed but if film the hologram is made from little 2"x2" tiles.

Misleading aspects of the story: This is not Star Wars technology come to life. Neither Princess Leia nor Queen Amidala will be hovering in mid-air begging someone for help. There's no motion involved in these holograms unless successive tiles have an animated image. The only way you'll get animation of any sort is the same way you get it out of the baseball cards printed with the plastic ribbing. Each viewing angle gives you a different instance frame. These images do not hover in mid-air either, their focal point is behind the surface of the view window.

The sort of volumetric projection in Star Wars is not possible without some super fancy technology to bend light rays once they hit a certain point in space. You need something for the photons to hit and change direction in, like glass. The people at Dimensional Media (www.3dmedia.com) have a system like this. They take a bunch of 2D slices and project them at high speed onto a piece of glass. Each of the 20 or so slices they use is a slightly different perspective on the 3D image. These are run through a beam splitter and projected onto a set of mirrors that projects onto a glass plate. The image seems to float behind the glass plate and as you move from side to side you're seeing one of the slightly different perspective slices. It is cool technology that might be getting somewhere because DMA has won a couple awards for their technology and got a research grant from somebody in January. I don't work for them or anything I've just run across lots of articles about them in the past 6 years and looked into their technology when I began to research building a home made volumetric projection system. While Zebra Imaging has a cool tech for static holograms I'm much more interested in realtime volumetric projection. My interest in holography lasted about as long as the power supply for my HeNe laser.

video

[Kraft]

Here is a competitors site with video: litiholo gallery

Should be possible to find more here

volumetric displays

[TMB]

For those interested in true volumetric displays, this is a nice overview of the current state.

[TMB]