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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.
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
Zebra Imaging is the company behind it all. Might be slashdotted already...
(Score:5, Not Funny)
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.
Here is a competitors site with video: litiholo gallery
Should be possible to find more here
-Kraft
Live and let live
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.