Slashdot Mirror
3D "Crystal Ball" Monitors
glesga_kiss writes "Actuality Systems have issued a press release announcing sales of their 3D display technology, as reported by Yahoo Finance. The system works similar to an old spining disk optical illusion, except that the 21st century version produces an image that can change through the use of digital projection. In this case the screen is a rotating disk that is capable of producing light at any point that it passes through. The upshot is that you get a real 3D representation of your object, that can be viewed from 360 degrees around the display, without the need for any special goggles. Not quite ready for Hollywood, but the scientific and engineering communities have some obvious uses for it already..."
Comment removed based on user account deletion
And check my e-mail!!! Woohoo!
Supported under Linux according to this. I wonder if the drivers are open source (I doubt it.)
... now it's really happening. Life imitates art. ;)
I remember first seeing something like this on Star Wars when I was kid
My journal has hot
just imagine how cool this would be!! 3dWM
why you gotta ruin such a good activity with that kind of description
It was in NASA Tech Briefs a cople months ago I think.
Why no one linked to the photos is beyond me, but slashdot posts are well-known for poorly-placed/defined links. Anyway, here it is.
I dont think true 3d will ever be ready for Hollywood. Movies are made to tell a story. Thats why camera angles and such are important. The story is whats happening on the other side of the room.
karma whore
no sign of slashdotting and your lame nude star wars comments suck
but can I display a TTY one one of these things, and what's the resolution from any given viewpoint?
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
Very exciting stuff, I'm blind in one eye so 3D "goggles" and their ilk have never worked for me! Thefore, I've been waiting for these technologies for a very long time.
The possibilities are endless but I expect it'll be a while yet before this becomes popular. Maybe within 10 years.
Surely you mean spinning disk? Somebody correct me if it's not just a typo...
Video Game cheats, hints a
Looking into my new crystal ball monitor I see this being a flop. Sure it seems really cool but you just KNOW it's going to out of the price range of nearly everyone, plus it's so small. Don't get me wrong, if I had the money I'd buy one the first day it comes out but alas, I don't so I won't.
Visit www.seriouslythough.com
Porn in 3d!
Too bad there isn't any tactile feedback... but you can tap on the glass and make it look like your interacting.
well, more of a movie projection,I guess. But Knotts Berry Farm (I think) in southern california, has (had?) a display with an alleged old indian shaman as narrator, that was effectively a 3d movie, without special glasses or anything. Quite solid-looking. It's really weird that the company hasnt been more prominent. I think the company was called "Virtual Light" or something like that.
;-) It was that realistic, that you would really have no idea just by looking at it. They had fancy fake smoke effects, which were the obvious "illusion". but I think the shaman himself was also a recording. If so, that makes it a really really good holo-display.
The whole thing was done up to look like a stage presentation, behind a glass box, elevated to the middle of a wall. Except if you looked at the depth of the wall from outside, there was no way the stage would fit in the wall
Your "mirror" is either Slashdotted while the main site works fine, or you posted the link BEFORE actually creating the mirror.
WHORE
Only $39,995 US. You'd want to be a dedicated pr0n watcher at that price!
Image Size and Display Type - Approx. 10" diameter spherical image - Swept-screen multiplanar volumetric display - Autostereoscopic: no viewing goggles - Volume-filling imagery - Supports many simultaneous viewers - no head-tracking Resolution / Color / Performance / Memory - Volume comprised of 198 2-D slices (1.1 slices / degree) - Approximately 768 x 768 pixel slice resolution - 24 Hz volume refresh - Full color (21-bit hardware-based stippling) - 8 colors at highest resolution - Polygons / sec.: To be announced - Dual volume buffers - TI(TM) 1600 MIPS DSP high-performance embedded processor - 3 Gbit DDR SDRAM (100 Mvoxels x 3 colors x 2 buffers) Viewing Angle - 360 horizontal, 270 vertical Brightness (typical) - To be announced Contrast (typical) - To be announced User Controls (Hardware and Software) - Power on/off, lamp standby, screen on/off - SCSI ID selector and auto-termination override - Additional functionality and control available through API Connectors - 2 SCSI-2 Wide Power Supply Electrical Requirements - Line voltage: 120V AC - Frequency: 50 to 60 Hz, single phase - Power: 250W Agency Approvals - Pending System Requirements - Works with PC-compatible systems running Microsoft® Windows 2000® or Linux. - SCSI connector. Size and Weight - 24" (61 cm) diameter x 9" (23 cm) high base - 20" (51 cm) diameter dome - Top of dome 21" (53 cm) from base of display - Weight: Approx. 60 lbs (27 kg)
I thought that's what the "turn your head and cough" test was for.
Why did you post this lame comment as a reply? I'll tell you why - because you're looking to be displayed high on some stupid moderator's page.
Your comment is in NO WAY a reply to the previous comment, and you waste my time saying NOTHING!
NO KARMA FOR YOU!
WHORE!
Something like this needs a "Killer App" to really take off. There's lots of mention of uses in the fields of medicine, nuclear whatever, and other big important things, but I don't think that's what's going to push these things. So, what is? Simple. Porn. Come on, you KNOW you'd buy it if you could watch 3D porn on it!
but the scientific and engineering communities have some obvious uses for it already...
360 degree up skirts with 3d vulva.
Doh! Forgot to post anonymously, damn rearranged options below the comment box!!
Oh well, the loss of karma from my parent post plus the gain of karma from my original karma whore post should even things out.
Not quite ready for Hollywood, but the scientific and engineering communities have some obvious uses for it already...
Which is to say, the people who designed it plan to make money off of it.
Warning: MySQL Connection Failed: Can't connect to local MySQL server through socket '/tmp/mysql.sock'
So...now they can watch their server crash in three dimensions.
------
This looks awesome - in the picture as seen here Military its about the volume of my 19" monitor - if not slightly larger. This might not help us to be more productive in the office, but it certainly will help with graphic design.
liqbase
Damn I said KARMA WHORE already to you.
You are a WHORE WHORE WHORE!
I come to Slashdot for a discussion, and even when browsing at 3 or 4 I have to see motherfucking lame ass jokes like your's, just cause it's worth a few karma points to the poster.
This has been around for a couple of years. I've seen this kind of thing at SIGGRAPH since at least 2001. Really neat, but not even close to brand new. Several companies make them.
Hmm... This seems all too familiar.
Toons!
Eeee-mail!
This same product by the same people has been on here at least once before, and it was months ago at that.
i realize that being a editor for this site and finding stuff to post is a danuting task and mistakes are bound to be made, but i figured i should be one of the first to point this out.
I do security
Since you've already shot yourself if the foot, go ahead and point the gun at your head.
Try the real thing: a woman!
Ooops, forgot where I am... sorry to be so insensitive...
(Note to moderators with high karma and low intelligence: this is _not_ a troll, it is called a joke... look for it in the dictionary)
here have fun...
liqbase
I remember seeing an earlier prototype version (?) of this thing on an Australian TV show called "Beyound 2000" sometime in the middle of the nineties (the show being even older). The prototype was cylinder-shaped and could only display primitive things like straight lines, but the idea was basically the same.
Hell is not other people; it is yourself. - Ludwig Wittgenstein
Interesting device. I developed the software used on the NOSC/SPAWAR laser-based volumetric display back in '96. It used a rotating two-bladed helix, in which each blade traveled from the top of the volume to the bottom of the volume as it rotated through 180 degrees. With two blades on a 600 RPM spindle, we got 20 frames/sec update - right on the cusp of image jitter. We used a Krypton/Argon laser and a prism to get RGB, and fed each primary color to a separate pair of acousto-optical devices steered by my program, which got an interrupt each time one of the blades crossed through zero degrees. The display space was 4096 by 4096 by 4096(polar coords), by using 12-bit D/A converters controlling X and Y, and 4096 slots in the display controller's memory, one for each of 4096 angles of rotation in 180 degrees.
Our major limitation was the decay rate of the acousto-optical devices, which limited the speed at which we could randomly paint the voxels in our volume. We did, at most (if I remember correctly) about 40,000 voxels per 20th of a second. As a result, we were limited to wire frame images.
Slashdot's name? When my compiler sees
GANDALF: They are not all accounted for, the lost seeing stones. You do not know who else may be watching!
That's why the crazy concept of "plays" never caught on. What were those Greeks thinking, trying to tell a story without camera angles?
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
...our latest progress. As You can see on this super cool 3D graph ...OUCH...
movies here
...where they had a holographic-like display (although not a true holograph, but it was the early nineties, so who knew any better). the gameplay was pretty flaky since they used taped actors and if you didn't move your joystick the right way, you're screwed (a la Dragon's Lair).
Here is a link to it.
This will be very helpful for people who do medical and scientific imaging.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Well obviously the pron sites will be very happy. All new 3d orb porn.
it's kind of funny, but the site works fine and the mirror is currently slashdotted :)
-- the cake is a lie
I too do "3D" but its only to connect to "Control systems" ... also the Vid proggry i have to enable system users to do maintenance vids is kinda cool...http://www.lamack.org/
*--- Sometimes a majority only means that all the fools are on the same side. ---*
"Wow! I have mustard?"
Xix.
"Everything is adjustable, provided you have the right tools"
notice the ©2001 at the bottom of the page...
Slashdot Eds Link Anonymous Posts With Logged Posts
They Are Vermin Feeding On Each Other's Feces.
I Hate \.
This is now item #716 on my "gadgets I wish I owned" list. (Yeah, yeah it's a really long list - one of the perils of slashdot). Anyway, imagine having one of these to hack away at...
Hmm.... only $40,000?.... and I've got a birthday coming up!
Don't know why you bothered posting, The Wicked Witch of the West had one of those things quite a while ago.
God moderators are moronic, how the hell is this offtopic? Yeah it's a horny geek comment, but it's mildly amusing, and more importantly he mirrored the image.
I saw this demoed at a trade show a couple of years ago -- looks about the same. It was an amazing demo, but I'm not sure that it's actually useful. The military likes the idea, though. Perhaps they want to see Princess Lea, too?
Stop flaming me about depth perception!
I've no idea how someone with 2 eyes views the world since I've been blind in one eye since birth. What I think is 3D and you think is 3D is probably different. Anyway, I have no problems with depth perception I probably just view it a different way to what you do.
Question: A TV screen is a "flat" 2D image, to me it's like looking through a window. Is it the same for people who have 2 working eyes?
I'm intrigued!
One problem I forsee with trying to make 3D movies is that devices similar to this crystal ball display objects to the user as an Outside In perspective, rather than a conventional display or flat 3D display. What I mean is that currently the viewers of a movie are usually, INSIDE the scene looking OUT, whereas the crystal ball is a scene where the viewer is OUTSIDE looking IN. Only objects directly in the field of view are modelled; it is impossible to show backgrounds in the crystal ball. In other words, Lucas wouldn't be able to create impressive pod racing scenes because all we would see is whichever pod is directly in the sphere of display, and MAYBE some ground speeding by when they get within feet of the surface and the soil enters the sphere that is modelled. Until a 3D background can somehow be displayed behind the objects modelled, the crystal sphere is only good for scenes with actors conversing or fighting within the confines of the spherical scene. The crystall ball builds up 3D models using true point sources of light that are in FRONT of the screen, whereas 3D panels trick the human eye into seeing virtual points of light somewhere behind the screen. It's just like real and virtual images created by lenses and mirrors: you can project real images into 3D space, but you can't see the background, whereas you can see the background of virtual images but you cant project the image of the object in focus into real space.
do a google search on "volumetric displays"
I saw a similar setup to this back in the mid 80's and, as I recall, they were going to use it for air traffic control. Possibly be useful in the combat control center of an aircraft carrier also.
Very cool idea but not really new.
-DU-...etc...
"Don't sweat the technique."
I can't wait to see the Blue Sphere of Death. :)
But seriously, what a cool gadget.
Paul
That thing is too cool... I've seen models like this for about 2 years now, but nothing with the quality this gives... cool.
||| I still can't believe Parkay's not butter.
It goes in the dustbin of TV history, along with all the other ideas that involve scanning with moving parts. (There's a really good collection of these at the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, incidentally.)
"I see your future... and its full of spam!"
i would be interested to know if anyone has planned to create an oversized version of the volumetric 3d display? it would much much more usefull, and to make it couldnt you just scale up the technology?
I don't want to waste a lot of time pointing this out, but take a little Smell-O-Vision by Sega jaunt for yourself .
Sure sounds good though, doesn't he?
--
Careful -- there is a chance of being spined to death by the deadly spines on the spiny, spiny spining disk.
like most advanced technologies, it starts out at a monstrous price and has little application.
/.ers might remember), no one would have assumed that computers would ever become affordable for everyone, or become powerful and small. Look at us now. with only 5 pounds of silicon and plastic, I have a computer that's thousands fold more powerful than the original computer.
Take the computer for instance. Not that long ago (during a time many
Same idea applies here. Someone will find a use for it, and be able to afford it (military or medical most likely). Then the technology will develop, and the price will become affordable for all.
History teaches us many things, this is one of them.
YOU SUCK BALLS!
I understand how the old card trick using strings and pictures on two sides works, but how exactly does this work?
I have some ideas on ways to do this, but I would like to know how they accomplished it.
I always imagined using lasers to do this, by finding laser beams that reflect light in all directions when intersecting occurs. Does anyone know of any lasers/beams that cause refraction when intersecting? If those exist, then the only problem seems finding a way to move the lasers fast enough and correctly positioned to intersect.
Question everything.
I want one!
Look at the size of that thing. How do you carry it around?
and only for a mere US $39,999!
Could this have a use (once price drops) for light shows?
Maxim actually bought this exact product probably a year or so ago. It was $30,000 and the CEO was very proud to have a 3rd representation of a boob on his desk.
There could be a flaming eyeball at the other end!
> Volume comprised of 198 2-D slices (1.1 slices / degree) - Approximately 768 x 768 pixel slice resolution - 24 Hz volume refresh
Has anyone pondered what sort of display hardware they must be using to project on to the spinning section? 198 slices @ 24Hz volume refresh must mean that it's drawing 4,752 frames per second.. impressive...
I don't think that it will take market from "normal" monitors, at least where text is important. Also reflection would be a killer thing there. I see it more used as a secondary display, maybe this time 3D graphic card will have well put their name.
Semi-off-topic, but too true =)
I should really get around to creating a sig.... Nah - too lazy =)
Not sure on the price -- something like tens of thousands. But that's not suprising, not outrageous for a new technology geared toward governments and research bodies, and not really a flaw.
But the resolution is 768x768 per slice, and about 200 slices. The resolution varies with distance from the center, there is no such thing as occlusion, it has a very limited number of colors, and the flicker varies based on distance from the center.
For some applications, these are not problems. However, the complete lack of occlusion (hidden surface removal) is the one that's going to hurt the most, and what more than anything else kept us from buying one.
at the lack of references to pr0n in the posts I've seen so far...
Frankly I am quite dissappointed! The trolls must be having a day off...(syeah right!)
I can see the advertising now:
"Amazing fantastic new 3D ball monitor with 3D-o-vision? Now you can have jerks all around!"
<<runs away and hides>>
...quake quake quake quake!
It's just too squinchy. And there's the foggy spot where the axis of rotation is.
Just for the coolness factor and large-scale effect, the pin display in X-Men wins for me.
One of my friends tried to make one for their senior project. It was pretty slow...they had to use linear steppers and they were too bulky to put very close together. I told them they should have spent their time researching voice coils. But they did have a little 16 pin matrix, which read patterns off a CompactFlash card and cycled through them.
...
Few /.'ers you mean. After all, most /.'ers are trying to start after school computer clubs.
Just what Miss Cleo needs!
All you touch and all you see is all your life will ever be
Holleywood will never adopt this technology, maybe however the military would. To store a complete 3d movie with even semi-realistic images, it would require thousands of terabytes of storage. Movies would also never come out in theaters (Therefore eliminating that market potential) unless the public would be interested in walking around a dome room bumping into each other and scrambling to get a good view.
If the dollar is an "I owe you nothing", then the Euro is a "Who owes you nothing." - Doug Casey
Not wanting to work out another solution only to find someone had beaten me too it, I decided to do a little research and see what else was out there. I found a woman, I also forget her name but you'll have to excuse me because I haven't looked at this stuff in quite a while, who was using rare earth element doped fluoride glass to produce volumetric displays. Her work involved utilizing IR lasers. When the two beams intersected in the glass they caused a point to illuminate. A raster or vector scan of the volume could produce three dimensional images. This work was paralleled by a man in Japan, again... can't remember his name.
After finding out about the rare earth doped fluoride glass processes I had to figure out another one. I did, it's really cool, and so far no-one else has put forth a similar design. However, I could never fund the work myself (I was a starving student), and then I began working for a big company with whom I have one of those "anything you think of is ours" clauses in my contract, so I can't work on it now either.
However, I may get a chance to pursue it in the not so distant future, and man will it be cool to see it operating. Of course if I ever do get it working I will make sure that my web site has the capacity to handle the slashdot effect.
Scsi connectors? 'Scuse me? Wouldn't something like USB 2.0 or Firewire be a more logical choice, because it doesn't require a special card and it's far more common? Also, when will we have truly 3D RTS games? Maybe something for use with Homeworld 2?
Hate me!
Does anyone remember the old optical illusion where an object is placed at the bottom of a (sort of) mirrored sphere, and then a perfect image of the object can be seen above the sphere ... using this diplay and this optical illusion a real holographic display would be possible... fitted under a desk, this would look insanely cool !
I think i'll wait untill it comes down in price o_O
cat
...pr0n, pr0n, pr0n!
there's no place like ~
And your reply was relevant how? All I heard was blah blah blah, I'm a troll blah blah blah.
Lets see here... obvious uses, obvious uses... Hrrrm... Number 1: Porn. Number 2: ...Fuck. Hold on, I'll think of something.
Banaaaana!
Sheeesh. More than 20 years ago, Steve Ciarcia in his Byte Magazine "Circuit Cellar" column described how to make such a system with an oscilloscope, three DACs and a photodiode on the spinning mirror.
"Damn this DSL!"
I suffer from attention surplus disorder.
ummm.... an i the only one that remembers seeing this exact same thing for the same company with the same name and everything 3 or 4 years ago?
sure, it wasnt commercially available then, but its stil probably not going to sell like hotcakes at 40k a pop.
That cool game with the monsters from starwars. Why didn't they create that as a demo.
Of course it's not "real" technology until Linux [check] and doom [comming soon?] are running on it! Oh, and it has to surf Pr0n too!
Then it will be "real" tech!
or, rather, all the 3D display technologies I've seen so far, is that there's no "hidden line removal", so to speak. Every technology i've seen is inherently transparent, and uses some means to generate perceived light sources within a volume.
Unfortunately, the human optical system isn't really built to deal with this on a regular basis; we expect *most* things to be at least somewhat opaque, and have a considerably easier time processing visual information that adheres to those expectations. So what's really needed is a way to not only change the color of a voxel, but also it's opacity; basically an "alpha channel". (You can't just do old school hidden line (surface) removal because you don't know where the observer is).
Clearly, this is impossible with any of the spinning disc/helicoid techniques; with some of the other ideas (like crystal activated by non-visible-wavelength, etc) it seems like it should be possible; use one wavelength to produce light, another to turn pixels opaque. Make the interior of an "object" opaque, illuminate the boundary, and you've got a display that's much easier for the human visual system to process.
Prediction: until this happens, no real 3-D displays except for highly specific industry applications.
"Actuality Systems have issued a press release..."
Why do people here refer to corporations as plural entities? Drives me nuts. Only here, nowhere else. 'Microsoft have announced this...' 'NVidia are working on...' Damnit, people.
err, never mind...
Actually, spinning-screen displays are capable of viewer position-dependent effects, such as occlusion. The spinning screen isn't the point - it's the screen. In order to make an arbitrary light field (through piecewise approximation), you need to be able to control both the amplitude AND the trajectory of each "ray bundle." If you use a screen that is not a diffuser, but something with beam-steering capabilities, you can do occlusion. For instance, see US Pat. 6,487,020.
patent link
-gregg
Since you asked nicely... ok, nobody asks me nothing, you could have been rude as well :-(
When "I" (and I suspect most of the humans) look thru a window we can perceive 3D-ness (?sp) in a range up to about 20-30 meters (about 70-100 feet, I guess).
Not everybody has a perfect vision and thus this limit could vary a lot (I have miopy).
At a great distance (e.g., when driving and seeing objects at 800m or half a mile), the picture is 2D for everybody, I suppose.
Now, regarding your question, that depends on what apparent distance the depicted objects appear to be on the TV.
For close images, where differences would stand out between TV and an image thru a window, everybody sees the TV image from the original perpective of the filming camera; the very same cues you use are probably employed by all of us, since we should have two different views from differently positioned cameras in order to achieve a real 3D perception.
This is done, as you might know, in 3D cinema.
Now, as you may know or not, most of what we perceive really happens in the brain and _not_ in the eyes... images in the eyes are upside-down, the eye must vibrate at 10Hz approx. to make things visible (a frog's eye won't do this, so it needs moving food like flies), objects are detected only in their edges and the brain does a quick flood-painting inside polygons... and all this is why babies must learn to see, also.
All this is to mean that we perceive TV images based on our learned experience of seeing real 3D objects. If you were born with only one-eye vision, it only marvells me that you can still have an useful #D perception.
Other than this, we're on the same boat, pal: it's 2D TV for us all, including you.
I think, as it was mentioned earlier, this has amazing applications for the science and engineering communities. Ever try visualizing a three dimensional mathematical function in your head? Except for most simple functions, this can be near impossible for all but a very few gifted people.
Chemists, Engineers, Physicists, etc, will all be able to see three dimensional functions with this new monitor without having to be exceptionally gifted at math. True, there are computer programs that can represent three dimensional functions extremely well on a computer screen... but they're still just a projection onto a 2D-surface.
This will also help Chemists in viewing complicated chemical models of protein chains, or reactions, whatever else.
I can think of a million reasons for having this around that maybe the average consumer won't have a use for, but the scientific community at large will have hundreds of uses for. And as the price comes down, then popularity among consumers, who may not have a driving need it for it, will increase.
I bet it will catch on quickly in research institutions, engineering firms, and universities and slowly trickle into business and consumer applications (games on a large version of this would be awesome). Reminds me of computers.
If it's a projection onto a spinning screen, you'll only be able to see it from one side. Stand on the side opposite the projector, and the screen will be between you and the image; the display will look blank.
That's why the movies only show the display from a 90-degree angle, instead of travelling all the way around it.
... and starting at $34,999 Im sure they will sell millions of them..
My UID is prime and so is this number: 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0.
There's a reason why all the examples they show are wireframe.
The device is just a spinning disc with lights, the disc is transparent so all you end up seeing are the lights apparently floating in a 3d plane. None of the points of light are going to be able to block eachother to display solid surfaces -- if you try to display a solid cube then each surface of the cube will be translucent and you'll end up seeing all sides of the cube atonce.
Without being able to display solid surfaces you're pretty limited the applications for it.
- MbM
Not quite ready for Hollywood, but the scientific and engineering communities have some obvious uses for it already...
By that of course they mean viewing a pic of Pam Anderson from all sides...
Business \Busi"ness\, n.;
A scam in which all people involved perceive as beneficial...
Granted I have some rage issues, but doesn't it just piss you off when you middle click on winshit in M$IE only to get some damn scrolling icon instead of pasting text!!!!!!!
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
heres how it works
I remember reading somthing on /. about OLEDs (organic light emitting diodes) and how sony or sharp or sombody is developing them. You could make this a lot smaller, put a lot of OLEDs on a clear surface, have it spin around a lot, and sell it for a lot cheaper.
Unfortunatly it seems they have a patent. Another good technoligy prevented from being further developed.... sigh.
I think I saw this in byte around 92 or 93. Any one recall? My collection got thrown out during a move
Diplomacy is the art of saying "Nice doggie" until you can find a rock. Will Rogers
How about Air Traffic Controllers they need 3D displays as much or more than anybody
Diplomacy is the art of saying "Nice doggie" until you can find a rock. Will Rogers
Oh it's you again Grow up
Diplomacy is the art of saying "Nice doggie" until you can find a rock. Will Rogers
"Not quite ready for Hollywood, but the scientific and engineering communities have some obvious uses for it already..."
Porn?
*snore*
Dennis Quaid in 3D? I knew there was a reason that I missed that flick.
Diplomacy is the art of saying "Nice doggie" until you can find a rock. Will Rogers
Uhh, that is a real guy behind the glass. The smoke is a projection superimposed on the scene using the "pepper's ghost" effect (which is also used to make him vanish at the end). Google it if you must.
I think a better option for "3D" movies is a project I saw some people working on once. They rigged a contraption that could film from 360 degrees at once... so you could watch a movie from the main shot, but at any time scroll to behind to see what's goin on behind you. It could be really cool if pulled off right. Imagine an interactive movie with surround sound where you'd hear a blast behind you and be able to scroll back there to see what the hell happened.
-Alex
here's a link in case you care to remember: Hologram Time Traveler Review
Well, you could always do hidden surfaces removal .. err, wait
Does the curvature of the eye create depth perception? I've only thought of the concept briefly, but for some reason i get the idea that one-eyed folks get more depth perception than shadows/size(experience/memory) alone could provide, and of course that goes double for two eye folk.
This object has been discussed before on
.
Slashdot
well its about damn time. How do you think i am supposed to shoot a torpedo down that 1 meter square hole without an acurate 3d model of the Deathstar's ventillation systems!!?
That is the most expensive (US$39,995) hardware for playing tetris that I have ever seen. But, oh I wish I could try it out. I think I'll take a look at the software anyways...
1000 hour projection lamp life... monitored by internal software... replacement lamps can only be obtained from Actuality Systems...
s pecta_v1_1_Actuality.pdf
http://www.actuality-systems.com/publications/Per
page 15...
>The expected projection lamp lifetime is 1000 hours of operation. The lamp operation time is monitored by the internal software and reported to the user on the display screen after power up.
>For safety reasons, the display will cease to operate after the lamp has been in operation for 1000 hours. At this point, the user will need to replace the lamp.
>A replacement lamp may only be obtained from Actuality Systems.
1000 hours is a ridiculously short time. And what's to bet that anyone who develops a hack to extend or disable this "feature" will have the DMCA chucked at him/her. And what about third party bulbs??? Probably find the bulb format and connector is unique and protected by a patent...
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
No there's no depth perception in one eye.
However if you move your head around then you are creating "multiple views" of the same area. Your brain can transform this into one 3D model. (As can computers.) Doing this for moving objects is of course a lot harder, but the human brain is very good at stuff like this.
Also at a higher level you have a lot of knowledge about objects. You know how big a car is supposed to be eg. So if you see a car then you can guess how far away it is by it's percived size.
And as has been pointed out shadows provide a lot of information as well.
Basically there is no way for one eye to directly percieve depth. But the brain is very good at making up for this.
Heh - It'd be cool to see Populous playing on one of these.
Perspecta can actually be seen a full 360 degrees around, and about 270 sweeping through the vertical. The reason is that the screen material has really good (i.e. "nearly Lambertian") transmissive and reflective angle parameters.
Someone here was wondering why the QuicktimeVR movies only go about 90 degrees. That's because it was difficult to take those shots... we had to set up a camera in many different locations. In reality, you can walk all the way around it.
Wasn't there a 3d video game in the mid 80s that used a crystal ball for the monitor? It featured (I'm sure I'm not making this up) a cowboy who travels through time shooting things. It didn't require any skill, you just had to know when to jump, duck or shoot. The arcade I saw this in had it against a wall so you couldn't really appreciate the 3d quality. In the same vein as the 'naked Princess' it had a miniskirked girl who travelled boy orb and told you why the cowboy was travelling through time.
I'll go one further: its damn helpfull for everyone who does 3d modeling. Engineers, gamedevelopers, biologists, whatever; if they've 3d-modeled on a 2d screen, they know that the 2d representation of a 3d object can be pretty distorive. Especially when you're looking at one angle for a while, especially while prototyping.
-- Waht? Tehr's a preveiw buottn?
Uh---did you look at the sugar molecule? Or any of the other pics? This thing runs on voxels...it does do solids.
As for your explanation as to how this thing works...it's woefully lacking and even misleading. The thing displays a full slice every degree or so. It creates the illusion of solidness the exact same way moving pictures are faked: the slices change for every angle of rotation and with an rpm of 760, you get multiple slices per angle per minute.
A quick view of the sugar molecule movie shows how this does work for solids.
(btw, I saw the movies a couple of years back [2001 I beleive], so maybe they're not there anymore).
-- Waht? Tehr's a preveiw buottn?
Anyone look at the price? This thing is a steal at only: US$39,995 plus installation
Forget about that new car...i'm getting a crystal ball.
Yet another case of something old - being seen by some "youngster" here on /. and thinking it's new - without any research into the topic. The IKONAS Frame Buffer was being used to display 3D images on rotating mirrors - over 20 years ago at UNC - to visualize molecules... It also was used to drive varifocal mirrors, dual displays with cross polarized screens, single displays with rotating shutter glasses, dual miniscreens on glasses (in darkened room with LED tipped antenna so that head position could be determined from cameras around the room)... this is back when a 512x512x32 bit frame buffer was well over $100k !
Nothing new here... it's the wheel being reinvented...
Whether the image is solid, wireframe or just points, you will be able to see through it. The way you solve this in 3D projection to 2D surface is to use hidden surface removel methods to not draw the obscured surfaces, Z-buffer being the most common for 3D accelerated cards on PCs.
In true 3D like this, you do not necessarily know what direction the user is viewing from, so you do not know which surfaces should be obscured. When it draws the backside, you WILL be able to see it through the front side. There is nothing solid about the front side, it's just a light hanging in space.
If the viewing direction IS known in advance (as in a prepared movie) then you could use hidden surface removel methods to alter the displayed image and remove the backside, but just from that one angle. But in general, the spherical nature of this display makes no rules about the viewing angle.
There is nothing so silly as other peoples traditions, and nothing so sacred as our own.
I remember first seeing something like this on Star Wars when I was kid ... now it's really happening. Life imitates art. ;)
Let the Wookie win!
Ed Wedig
Graphic design services
docbrown.net
IBM demonstrated a prototype of this at least 10 years ago (I remember reading the article in an old InfoWorld). I believe it was in the mid to late 80s. Theirs only showed wire frame objects and it used a red laser. It was about the size of a hat-box, 12-15 in. across and about 8 in. high. It was WAY COOL back then...
I have to use this cause I can't afford a real sig...
here almost a year ago Friday May 24, @02:44PM 2002
The Only Person Willing to be Me is ME!
Tetsumo, Keneda, and led by AKIRA.
I know that it isn't how the movie goes, but I'm reaching for a comment about it.
Great flashes of elvis
Alas, poor clippy, I loath him so.
I love Autechre.
Don't get the hate cure part....
I'm going to get one so I can display /var/log/messages on it.
Then when they ask me "hey Martin is the mail server back up?" I can reply with "I dunno, let me look into my crystal ball....."
It's not that different from what I do now...
OK, so how much does one of these bad boys cost??? I looked through their site and saw no information regarding that aspect of the project. They are for sale, but they don't give me enough information to know if I want to buy one.
Well, I figure that if they are not saying then it must be more than I can pay...
This is perfect for displaying Princess Leia asking for help like in star wars, accept totally nude.. Sweet I want one!!
(oh and just incase it gets slashdotted, here's a mirror of what the thing looks like)
Sycophantic Karma Whore! You sir, are a TOOL!
...because I can't see what the heck's going on in in Minas Morgul these days. My connection to Orthanc seems to be down too...
Quod scripsi, scripsi.
It's binocular vision (having two working eyes) that allows us* to perceive depth, in much the same way that having two ears allows us* to enjoy sterophonic sound, locate the source of a sound, etc.
One advantage to having just one working eye is that you never "see double" when you lose your focus.
*well, most of us
Thi is the coolest thing I have seen in years! And it runs on Linux!!!!
THeres one in CT that does this, rotates like once every 10 minutes. IM afraid i cant rememeber the name of it.
All Troll + "offtopic" mods are meta moderated as "Unfair", because you abused the system.
Yeah, I saw that woman with the rare-earth doped flouride glass at SIGGRAPH '97 or so. Just looked her up on google and found a name and familiar picture: Dr. Elizabeth Downing. Further googling turned a website for her company, 3DTL.
There was a flurry of info about it in 1997 and not nearly as much since then. Did it go private or did it fold? Further googling describes 3DTL getting a $1.9 million NIST grant in late 1998, and a $340k grant in 1999. Not much visible info since then; I supose you could call the phone number on their website to find out more. I recall one key problem being the small size of the laser-addressable cube. There are probably problems aligning lasers as you scale up in size, but this is speculating based on 5-year old memories.
I ran across a nice survey paper motivated by the problems with rotating displays that discusses a lot of the static volumetric displays including Dr. Downing's.
--LP
Yours Today For Only $39,995!
it seems some newbie-moderator has modded a perfectly legit post down. its here I just want my voice to be heard
Sure, but in order to be of any real use, the globe needs to be much bigger. Today, designer/engineers are using at least 21" screens and resolutions of well above 1280x1024. You are of course right about the misleading effect of 2D views, but any experienced person will rotate the model they are working on once in a while, just in order to let the brain get a refresh on how the model looks in 3D. Try it yourself: You just need to rotate the model about 10 degrees in each direction.
Excellence: Moderate (mostly affected by comments on your karma)