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!"

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For the Karma

[The_Mighty_Squid]

Are Holograms Finally for Real?
By: David H. Freedman
Issue: July 2002

This staple of sci-fi is starting to live up to its billing, and its potential in the workplace is anything but an illusion.

In the months leading up to the debut of the new Ford Thunderbird last fall, the car's four-person design crew was asked to show its most recent tweaks to company executives. So it did what any auto-design team does: It hauled its latest prototype out to the center of a conference room for a group "walkaround." There, managers cooed over the slick coupe's rakish lines from every imaginable angle.

But "prototype," in this case, might be the biggest understatement in automotive history. What the designers and executives were in fact viewing was a computer-generated hologram -- hovering slightly off the floor -- that not only rendered the T-bird in perfect 3-D but also provided different views as observers moved around it, as if it were really there.

Such startlingly lifelike projections are so compelling a technology -- as we saw when R2-D2 emitted his "Help me, Obi-Wan" hologram of Princess Leia 25 years ago in the original Star Wars -- that it's difficult to imagine a future in which they're not ubiquitous. It's the present that's the problem. Until now, holograms have been little more than second-rate gimmicks, thanks to the fact that holographically creating anything more than small, washed-out images has proved exceedingly expensive and time-consuming. But that's about to change. Zebra Imaging, a six-year-old startup in Austin that created the Thunderbird holograms (as well as another for the P2000, one of Ford's experimental hydrogen-powered vehicles), is but one of several companies refining new techniques for producing life-size holograms on the fly, using both real and computer-generated images.

In conventional holography, whose uses to date have been limited to things like novelty art and anticounterfeit decals on CD jewel cases, a laser beam is split in two, with one section shining directly at a large sheet of film and the other bouncing off the object in question before being rejoined with the first. On the film, the overlapping beams etch patterns that contain enough information to render the entire image as seen from different angles. When you look at the developed film, each of your eyes sees a slightly different view of the image, providing the flawless 3-D illusion, and walking or moving your head to the side offers a side view, exactly as it would if the object were real.

Zebra's new technique is similar but uses a digital image in place of the physical object. Its computers convert a standard graphics file into a pattern displayed on a large, translucent LCD screen. A laser then fires three different-colored beams through the screen. When the beams converge and hit a special film that can be quickly developed with ultraviolet light and heat, the image emerges in startlingly realistic 3-D detail.

Such breakthroughs portend a wide array of new business applications, at least if Zebra's ever-expanding client roster is any indication. Customers include Boeing (BA), Exxon (XOM), and Ford (F), not to mention the Bob Marley Museum in Kingston, Jamaica, which recently bought a life-size hologram of the legendary reggae king. Mark Holzbach, the company's co-founder and chief technical officer, ticks off a handful of projects already in the works: holograms for product design (à la the Thunderbird), oil and gas exploration (modeling rock layers and fissures a mile below ground), jetliner navigation (making mountains visible through clouds), and even advertising (festooning brochures, billboards, and store windows with eye-popping 3-D imagery).

Alton Parrish, an analyst at technology consulting firm Business Communications in Norwalk, Conn., predicts that design applications alone will create a $100 million market for the sort of holograms Zebra can now produce, and that the overall market for high-quality holography will eventually approach $1 billion. "If the manufacturing design industry can get access to high-quality, fast holographic imaging," he says, "it's likely to adopt the technology." That's not as big an understatement as calling Zebra's T-bird a prototype, perhaps, but it's an understatement nonetheless.