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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!"
that Ford really sucks, it's an awesome technology.
Utinam logica falsa tuam philosophiam totam suffodiant!
... can we classify ghosts as 'legasy systems' now?
"You laugh at me because I am different. I laugh at you because you're all the same." --Vick Imbornoni
The article says nothing of the sort. The article says that the hologram is still captured on a 2D piece of film. All that's different is that the image is computer-generated rather than from light shining off a physical 3D object. The only mention of Star Wars in the article is as an analogy.
"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."
Yeah, I got the same feeling from their ANNOYING POPUP.
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.
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.
Donate background CPU time to fight cancer.
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
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
Hey, thanks a lot for posting a mirror to this! We know how often huge sites like business2.com get slashdotted, especially those with AOL/TW backing.
Do me a favor, the next time there's a story on, say, cnn.com or msnbc.com, please mirror it; those sites just don't have the bandwidth to last more than a few clicks!
python -c "x='python -c %sx=%s; print x%%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))%s'; print x%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))"
You definitely need something to project a hologram on to. It doesn't just work with thin air. (Air's invisible, remember?)
The only solution for a real walkaround 3D hologram I could think of would be some kind of plexiglas bubble filled with smoke of something other half translucent (to let the lasers through)/half "lightable" (to catch the light and reflect it for the eyes).
Am I making sense or what?
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
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?
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.
Zebra Imaging is the company behind it all. Might be slashdotted already...
(Score:5, Not Funny)
In this case it was a girl in her underwear squirming out of her panties.
...All funded by government money and admission fees.
Not that I minded, of course.
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
Don't like it? Don't read it.
It would be nice if it were that simple, but eventually people like you are going to piss off enough of the wrong people and Slashdot is going to be sued yet again for copyright infringement. It's not like LNUX is really rolling in money, those lawyers are costly to retain.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
Jokes about porn aside, the thing that'll bring holographic TV and so on to your living room will be the porn industry.
They seem to have been behind most other home-entertainment systems recently, and so, let's hope the porn industry DOES get interested in this.
Score:-1, Funny
No popups on my screen.
If you're using IE, you have no right to bitch about popups.
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.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
why isn't a post metamoderated down to hell?
Because a metamod is when a moderated comment is further moderated for fairness.
Here is a helpful sugestion for posting on Slashdot.
A. Read
B. (important) Think
C. Re-read (because looking stupid hurts ones D. Decide whether posting is worth it.
E. Post.
Here is a competitors site with video: litiholo gallery
Should be possible to find more here
-Kraft
Live and let live
However, after turning off one of my lights, a large hologram was illuminated, and it looked spectacular!
Berto
For those interested in true volumetric displays, this is a nice overview of the current state.
[TMB]
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.
I think you could call a device to create a 2D image in the air reliably a "projector"? ;)
-- Pete.
Monochrome - Probably the UK's largest internet BBS
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.
This is pretty cool, but the real breakthrough in product design technology is stereolithography. A way of making real object by using layered exposure of photopolimers to laser light, extreemly cool and (now) pretty expensive. It allows to make true to life models extreemly fast.
there is some info here - a commercial site.
Okay, I admit I haven't read the article. (Whaddya expect? I just rolled out of bed a few minutes ago, and I'm only surfing Slashdot right now to avoid going to work.)
;-)
Nevertheless, I'm having a hard time understanding why this kind of hologram would be more useful than, say, a VR wall or room? I've seen some of SGI's demos of 3D visualization technology using Onyxes or Octanes, projectors, and stereo glasses. Granted, those images aren't truly volumetric, so you can't put your finger into them or anything... but the same is true of these holograms we're talking about. They only appear to be volumetric.
And a VR environment like that has the benefit of being in full color, with full interactive animation and whatnot. You can use the wireless mouse thingy to "grab" the model and rotate it on any axis, with frame rates from 120 all the way down to a few per second, depending on the complexity and the oomph behind your computer system. Sounds a lot cooler and more useful than a static hologram image to me.
I dunno. I guess I'm just not as dazzled by the word "hologram" as I was when I was seven.
"...idea of what it would be like for someone in the 3 dimensional world to suddenly be transported to a 4 dimensional world."
Wouldn't a 4d object cast a 3d shadow? I mean, a 3d object casts a 2d shadow and a 2d object cast a 1d shadow. No?
-Kraft
Live and let live
I bet we'll get consumer projection holography within a decade. (I'm not sure if we'll ever get news channels again, though.)
I don't know if anyone else noticed but the company who did the little image explaining how it worked was called XPLANE.
Now in the spirit of capitalism (not allowing this XPLANE company get a monopoly on cheezy diagrams) and the tradition of Riki Ricardo of "I Love Lucy", I propose its time some of us get together and start our own company named SPLANE. Our motto could be that "We got some SPLANE'n to do" or maybe just "Bobaloo".
Oh shit that's funny. I don't get that show on PBS where I live.
And yes, the moderator was really on the ball marking that one "Insightful"
Information Week recently ran a piece on the major IT transition at General Motors. While not using this kind of hologram technology, they are making good use of projected 3-D models combined with VR headsets.
Here's a little more detail on the system and how to use it to frighten children. (And no, it doesn't involve 3-D displays of Pontiac Azteks....) If you read this article, note the slip of the car name...the article says it's "Solaris", when it it's actually "Solstice"
VR systems (both immersive HMD systems as well as "CAVE" type displays) are good for "walkthroughs", "walkarounds", even "testing" (such as for ergonomic placement of controls, or viewing angles from seats, etc) - but neither technology (as of yet) allows for "real size" views.
Most VR systems do NOT represent the objects in a one-to-one unit basis - most of the time the virtual world is scaled or distorted in some manner. This is normally because of the viewing system used - with an HMD, if the objects were represented at real scale and perspective, things would look slightly odd (especially in the higher-res, low FOV HMDs). CAVEs tend to distort things as well to fit the projection screens and minimize the distortions at the wall joining edges. Lower-res, high FOV HMDs can't be used, because resolution is lost, and thus accuracy for measurement. HMDs do not allow for real rulers, only virtual ones. CAVEs allow for real rulers, but if the image is slightly distorted, it is useless for engineers. Another thing against HMDs and CAVEs is "simulator sickness"...
I am not saying that either technology is completely useless - there are aspects that make both appealing for engineering use, but prototype display for design reconfiguration probably isn't one of them. I also think that the accuracy could be preserved, but it would be expensive. I think at some point the tech will come down in price to allow this.
However, this hologram technology allows for the fast "duplication" of a CAD/CAM drawing (which may or may not be represented in real size on a monitor) into a medium that allows the engineers (and non-engineers!) to view at real size, as well as (possibly) take real size measurements using real measuring equipment. The hologram in this case is a real size volumetric image of a virtual design. It is probably the fastest method of rapid prototyping for large scale objects that we will have for a while.
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
Sounds like what they used in Logan's Run
The images moved too.
If you don't want to repeat the past, stop living in it.
It's two or three back-projection walls and a front-projection floor with alternate frame 3-D synchronizing with a pair of tracked LCD flip glasses. Very clever math for getting the projections right and a very convincing display (especially if you're the one wearing the tracker), but not a hologram.
It is cool, though. I've written code for it.
Holograms called "integrals" have been possible for decades. (They are featured in the 70's cheesoid flick Logan's Run) They are traditionally made from motion picture film, with the subject on a rotating platform. Each frame of film produces a single vertical strip hologram. These integrals produce horizontal parallax, but no vertical.
So, is this just a cheaper way to make bigger integrals, or have they solved the knotty problem of getting vertical parallax as well? If the former, OK, but yawn. If the latter, that's pretty impressive. It's conceivably possible to do, but I can't find anything in the article that makes it clear.
> Unfortunately the shadow from a 2d object is also 2d, so your theory needs a little work :)
It actually depends on the subspace you're talking about. If you're talking about a 3d subspace (which I assume you are), the shadow of a 2d object can be either 1d or 2d, depending on the angle of the light to the surface of the 2d object. (if the light hits edge on, it casts a 1d shadow)
In a 2d subspace, objects only cast 1d shadows, because there is no "sideways" in which the light can hit the flat part of the surface. The 2d light source is always edge on to the 2d object occupying the same plane.
In post-9/11 America, the CIA interrogates YOU!