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

What is a halodeck?

[Istealmymusic]

I have never stumbled across this term before, does it refer to an xbox game or something? I'd like more information.

Karma Whore Nothing...

[denisonbigred]

I can already see where "feeling" holograms will lead. The dont call it the worlds oldest profession for nothing.

Been around for years

[DalTech]

3D images have been around since I was just a small child and you didn't need special glasses to see them.

It was and probably still is called a viewmaster.

Technology

[phorm]

If anyone has ever gone into a hologram shop and looked at the merchandise...

Yes, they are cool, but they're also somewhat indistinct. For a lot of them, you get an overlap at various angles, and have to squint a bit. The colors are also way off. While this is ok for a novelty static image, I think that for my PC I would want something of a higher caliber.

The second article shows a "sample" picture. Obviously some of the realism and depth will be lost by showing it on a computer monitor (like those digital TV "see the clarity" ads on my normal set), but it looks pretty indistinct to me.

Showing a wireframe 16-color DNA molecule in pseudo-3d is one thing. Managing to get the broad spectrum of colours in a good refresh rate with realistic and crisp depth is probably going to take some time yet.

Oh, and what's with the demo. "Two cameras track eye movement???" Seems pretty dumb to me, as how is it going to handle multiple people for the stereoscopic view, or ever properly track eye moment.


I think I'll save my quarters for a high-def 21"+ monitor - phorm

Re:Technology

[amthrax]

The low quality holograms that you find in stores are usually exactly that, low quality. A high quality, properly lit hologram can be absolutely breathtaking. I've seen a number of holograms (ironically, at the MIT Museum) that, were it not for their illumination, would have looked real: solid and sharp. One of my favorites was a hologram of a telescope and the night sky. Yes, the telescope worked. You could stand in the right place and look through the holographic telescope and you would see exactly what you would expect to see, had the telescope been real. I even ducked once because I turned to look at a hologram as I was walking by and thought I was going to run in to it. Granted, these were all static holograms, and I don't know how they are achieving/plan to achieve moving holograms (and high quality systems will probably be prohibitively expensive at first).

The LCD overlay is a completely different approach. It is not holographic and does not claim to be. The "two cameras [that] track eye movement" are a vast improvement over previous display technology that uses this same approach, but requires the user to remain stationary (see 3D LCD Display though the technology has been around for a while). And, no, obviously this doesn't work for multiple users because it's targetting the location of a single user.

3D display technology is cool, but still young. The progress that has been made over the past two or three years alone is amazing. Give it a year or two more in the lab, and I bet that it will start having real impact on the world.

Oh no!

[prestomation]

Will this holographic technology lead to the downfall of stripclubs and prostitution?

Re:Holodeck

[drinkypoo]

Holographic Barbara Bush saying you weren't her type could create some pretty wicked psychic scars.

Not as deep as if the real thing said you were.

Still, that would be better than hearing it from Janet Reno, and a jillion times better than hearing it from Madeline Albright. Is she even human?

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.

Re:Tracking Eye Movements

[broken_bones]

From a technical standpoint agree with you. I'd love to see a 3D system that was viewable from all angles by multiple people without using tricks like eye tracking. Oh the many things I could do..the many games I could play...

However I think it would be wise to consider that technology development is a continuous process of improvement. This isn't the end of 3D development. It is only one step in the process. While this technology may not be particularly useful to the average user right now, it is good to see it being developed because it gives hope that future development will yield really cool toys...er um useful products. Just think about the computer on your desk. Its ancestors used punch cards and vacuum tubes and probably wouldn't have been much use to you personally as a user. They were, however, a necessary step in the development of the desktop computers we use today.

sorry miss..

[Anonymous Coward]

.. I thought you were just a hologram.

Motion sickness to the next level?

[miscellaneous_havoc]

I must say that the idea of three-dimensional computer use would be extremely... COOL! However, I think that for quite some time during the first years of development, there will be problems with people having adjustment problems. When I first played the N64--before I had a computer--the 3D graphics alone made me a little naucious after the first few hours. I adjusted all right, but that was being displayed on a 2D screen. Well, perhaps it's just me, but I think this won't be too great in its early years.

Top Ten List

[MacAndrew]

Top ten reasons it won't happen:

10) Hard to be sure the performer is "real"
9) Too hard to transmit disease-causing viruses over net
8) No chewing gum stuck to bottom of shoes afterwards
7) Lacks thrill of getting mugged in crappy neighborhood
6) Too clinical without camaraderie of fellow perverts
5) Two words: lightning strikes
4) Risk of getting caught looking goofy is greater at home
3) Hard to explain those funny-looking peripherals to Mom
2) Neighbors tire of cops breaking into holojohn's house
1) Can't replicate thrill of accidentally picking transvestite

Disturbing Potential

[DocStout]

With fewer ethical controls on corporate interests, this sort of thing could get wacko-conspiracy-theorist scary. Holographic video is based on technology taking advantage of the difference between the speeds that we can process images with light, and the speeds that information can be translated through the eyes by the brain. Now, movies are based on the same concept, basically, to simulate movement of static pictures. The frightening thing is that subliminal messages should be easier to work into technology such as this, and when presented in the right situation, whether what you are looking at is real or not can even be called into question. Imagine a 3-D advertisement subtly inserted into a virtual fish tank. With sufficiently advanced technology, we could be subjected to ads when we think we're just looking around the "real world", whatever that will come to mean. How possible is it that this technology will be used to advertise before it is used to entertain? Will we know the difference?

These are NOT HOLOGRAMS!

[rufusdufus]

The article and the author, and apparently the readers here are substantially misguided in their understanding of what a hologram is. A hologram is not defined by 3D stereopsis! The technologies listed in the article are not holograms .

A hologram does not use 3D glasses or LCD displays. Holograms are film recordings of a 3D wavefronts of an object. This is very important, as with a hologram, you can look behind objects by moving your viewing position.

Thus, holograms are not illusions of 3D, they are actually 3D--they have true depth and your eyes can focus on different planes of depth.

The technologies listed here (as all other 3D technologies except holography) simply trick your eyes into seeing different images which create an illusion of 3D stereopsis. They do not however allow your eye to focus on different points in 3D space, look behind objects, or change your perspective. They are thus inferior to holograms by a significant amount.

Why dont we have Holographics displays then? Well it has been done, but it takes too much memory to capture the full 3D wavefront of an object, so its not practical yet. Moores law will fix that soon I hope.

Um...

[autopr0n]

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?"

How often do you move you're head while sitting in front of the computer? Besides, the system only needs to know where you're eyes are down to the distance between you're eyes. On a system with a lag of 10ms, for example, you would need to move you're head 4 inches in 10ms before you would notice any distortion. That's 227 miles per hour. If you're head's moving that fast, you've got other things to worry about.

Even with a 100ms delay, you've still got to move you're head side to side at 23 miles an hour to lose the holographic display.

As far as eye tracking, if the software/hardware can produce images for 4 points of view, then just track four eyes with the camera, otherwise it's not an issue anyway. Repeat with more sets of eyes.

Speaking of Holodecks...

[ffatTony]

Maybe the holodeck is not that far away !

Speaking of Holodecks: If you could live out any fantasy in such an environment, would you bother to come back to the real world? As soon as holodecks are created I predict society as we know it will end as everyone will be so utterly absorbed in the fantasy finding it probaby better than real life.

Target Marketing

[Tokerat]

Did anyone else check out the 3D Volumetric Display at Actuality Systems? Very, very cool stuff.

Their marketing department also seems to realize the average consumer will use this for 3D pr0n, as their Photographs page takes special care to include a "last but not least" shot of "[The] pelvic region of female anatomy."

w00t! :-)

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?

We'll know this tech has potential ...

[snilloc]

... when Larry Flynt starts pumping money into R&D.

Duplicate article, duplicate discussion

[Hal-9001]

A few points:

• This article was already posted on Slashdot just two weeks ago.
  
• Both times, the story poster focused on the stereoscopic display being developed at NYU instead of the much more ambitious (and much cooler, IMHO) holographic display being developed at MIT.
  
• Just because something looks 3D doesn't mean it's a hologram, i.e. the stereoscopic display is not a holographic display.
  
• Each system has its advantages and disadvantages. The stereoscopic display has the advantage of requiring less computation and viewer selectivity. It has the disadvantage of the complication of viewer tracking, and it requires that a separate image be rendered for each viewer. The holographic display has the advantage of being a true three-dimensional image--you can move your head to see the object at different angles without re-rendering, and a single rendered image can be viewed by multiple viewers. The disadvantage is that rendering a holographic is very computation-intensive, and most of the information rendered in a holographic image is not seen by the viewer.