Slashdot Mirror
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!"
or would that be comdii? :)
Anyway, a few years ago there was supposedly a company that "stole the show" with they three dimensional holographic projectors. None of the various news sites had pictures, and I don't watch much tv so I don't know if they had video... but one of the reps for the company said that these were reasonably priced and that you'd be seeing them in malls across the US by year end. Obviously, that never happened at least not in Seattle.
Slightly OT... but oh well.
sig.
I remember at the Disneyland "Innoventions" thing, Silicon Graphics had this face scanner that would map someone's face into a 3-D object onscreen, and then manipulate it and whatever. While relatively old technology, not only could the new holographic methods be used to display nonphysical prototypes, it could also be used in conjunction with an object scanner to communicate dimensions and depth of existing objects in a more real form from a great distance.
I can't.
My eyes don't convergence where my eyes focus, except for really close objects. Its quite a common problem, and should not be ignored, I keep wondering how I and others will cope when holograms become more common. It's similiar to colour blindness now.
- Ost
---- Sig. gone.
When you look at the picture at the end of the article, you can see that one part of the laser is directed through a LCD screen, afa I understand it, if you change the pic on the LCD you change the hologram, changing pictures gives you animations if you can change 'em fast enough. Also, according to the graphic, the projection is in the room in front of the projection panel, not behind, like in the common art-photo-holos.
.sigh
Several years ago I went to a store in Hong Kong that sold high-end holograms. I'm pretty sure I saw a tube-shaped film that you could walk completely around. These type of holograms can theoretically be made on any shape of film (flat, curved, tubular, etc.) The only problem is exposing the entire surface of the object to the two portions of the split laser beam.
For what it's worth, I messed around with holograms in high school. My physics teacher (Tommy Toor, Lyman High School) let me take home the lab's hologram kit, including the laser! How cool is that! (This was 1984...they didn't have laser pointers back then, at least not cheap ones; this laser was about the size of an extra large box of tin foil.) Anyway, you could make two types of holograms: reflection and transmission.
The reflection holograms were the low-quality types you see on credit cards and cd cases. They were pretty flat, but you could view them in ordinary light.
The transmission holograms were much more dramatic. You had to view them through a piece of transparent film illuminated by laser from behind. The object would appear to be beyond the film, rather than on the surface. These are the types that you see in museums and some high-end stores (don't know if they've come up with a way to view them without the laser?) Most of us have seen how you can move from side to side and get a different view as if the object was really there, even to the extent of "unmasking" hidden contours as you move. But a little known fact is that you can cut up the film and each piece still contains the image. Think of covering up different parts of a window: you can still see an object placed outside, but you have to position yourself in a different place to see it. Same with a transmission hologram. If you cut the film in quarters and give them to your friends, they could each see the object. One would have to look down and to the left, one looks down and to the right, etc. Very cool.
Anyway, the technology described in the article sounds like high-quality, quickly produced transmission holograms. Star Wars-style holograms will require some sort of 3-D medium as discussed above.
Evil is the money of root.
perhaps this is off-topic, but as a kid I used to visit my grandfather when he worked at RCA in Princeton, this was circa 1980. He'd take me around to all of his scientist buddies and show me the cool stuff they were working on. I remember big lasers (whoa), lots of weird laser-disc storage media, primitive green pixel-ly flat televisions, and they also had a short holgraphic film loop. It was tiny, maybe six inches tall, and it was a silvery image of guys playing football that could be viewed from several angles. I hadn't heard of anybody whipping them out again until now. Having been 9 at the time I had no idea how it worked. This was the last thing I'd witnessed as a child that I hadn't yet seen as an adult.
Not quite... the diagram they show is sort of deceptive.
What they show is a typical hologram recording setup, but with an LCD instead of the actual 3D object.
Seems that use of this method would require multiple exposures in order to recreate 3d as perceived in the finished hologram- as the CAD object on the LCD is rotated, the mirror at point #3 would have to change angle in order to change the incidence angle of the laser on the film.
This is nothing *really* new, except that it looks like they are using really large film plates and an LCD in place of the actual object.
Another (much more difficult) way to produce computer-generated holograms would require a huge amount of processing power. A standard hologram captures the interference pattern generated by the incidence of the object and reference light beams.
If a display existed with fine enough resolution to display such an interference pattern, a computer could conceivably generate realtime holographic displays by calculating the interference pattern for a particular scene. Would need a huge amount of processing power and display technology that's not quite commonplace just yet.
> a computer could conceivably generate realtime holographic displays by
> calculating the interference pattern
I think that's where the real future of holograms lies. Conventional (high resolution, non-rainbow type) holograms are extremely hard to produce for two reasons: they can only create 1:1 scale images, and require an extremely stable benchtop, since the slightest movement or vibration will still be much larger than the wavelength of light, seriously disrupting the interference patterns. OTOH, a computer-generated hologram has none of these limitations, since it doesn't require an actual physical object. In fact, you could generate holograms of actual physical scenes by photographing them Matrix-style with cameras arranged circularly and then generating the interference patterns from that. Or you could even use one of these newfangled camera setups with position and attitude sensors to "paint" a scene and then generate a hologram at any scale from that.
IIRC, high-rez holograms use emulsions with about 1000 lines per mm, so that's the type of display resolution required for high quality holograms. You might get by with less for acceptable quality, though. I think we'll see holographic displays like this along with the requisite computing power within the next 10-15 years.