Holograms - The Future Without The Funny Glasses

hopbine writes "MIT Technology Review has an interesting article on the latest trends in holograms. I like the NYU's NY3D system. It puts an LCD display in front of a normal CRT and by monitoring the viewers eye movement it can flash on and off parts of the LCD screen showing each eye a different image through the gaps, producing a 3D image. Another research project shows how researchers can "feel" the hologram. Maybe the holodeck is not that far away !"

Comments

Tracking Eye Movements

[lommer]

Is it just me or does the whole concept of tracking people's eye movements in order to generate 3D images fundamentally wrong? My first reaction every time that I hear this is "isn't there lag in between when a user moves his eye and the computer adjusts?" I can understand eye tracking for some purposes, but not really for display.

My main concern in this though is that two people cannot see in 3D off of the same screen at the same time. Personally, I don't think that 3D imaging technology will move much beyond it's current "look i'm shiny, new, but not really practical" until we begin to see actual 3D constructions in space. Either that or transparent cubes that can have 3D images rendered inside them.

Close enough: holographic stereograms

[jab]

I worked as an undergrad in the MIT lab in the mid-1990's and probably the first thing I did was break the holovideo system. I had no idea that the tip of a soldering iron is electrically grounded; I touched it to a live wire and promptly sent the power supply up in smoke and very nearly fried some custom wirewrap circuit boards. Fortunately, I wasn't fired (thanks Steve!) and I learned a lot about holography over the next few years. While I don't work on holograms today, that early exposure to research was invaluable and convinced me to pursue a career in image processing.

The MIT holovideo system does compute interference patterns, which are used to diffract light. It's the real deal in terms of focusing light in the right place. A lot of math techniques are used to reduce the computation, but the important part is there - directing light in the right places.

I don't know what's changed over the last half decade or so, but "way back then" there was one main difference between the holovideo system and traditional holograms. For holovideo, the diffraction patterns were calculated from a whole bunch of 2-D computer graphic images (i.e. the view from each angle) rather than a real live 3-D object. Perceptually, there is no significant difference between a holographic stereogram and a hologram, as long as enough viewing angles are used. But from a technical standpoint the creation technique is different -- so it has a different name.

By the way, one of the biggest annoyances was showing off the state-of-the-art holovideo system or still holograms to visitors, and having people consistantly say "Wow, those holograms look really bad." Everyone just assumed we'd at least be as good as Princess Leia in Star Wars; after all that movie was made decades ago, right?