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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..."
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
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
What they need to d is make onethat show the same image 90 degrees apart. that way you can have 1 screen but an audience 'in the round' as it were.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
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
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!
> 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...
As a system integrator/end user support person, I'll tell you exactly why 3D UIs are a bad idea:
Because this is 2003, and I STILL hear, "You mean the other mouse button does something DIFFERENT?" far too frequently.
If people can't handle a mouse with two buttons, trying to understand a 3D UI will make their brains liquefy and flow out of their ears.
~Philly
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.
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.
On the machines this thing is likely to be hooked to, SCSI is almost guaranteed to be there. Or maybe it's because SCSI can run in synchronous mode. I dunno, just guessing.
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.
That's why the crazy concept of "plays" never caught on. What were those Greeks thinking, trying to tell a story without camera angles?
No, stage dramas take full advantage of "camera angles". Instead of moving a camera to change the viewers angle, they change the scenery and staging of the action to change the camera angle.
Just about every city with a decent sized theater community has a "theater in the round" where the audience sits completely or nearly completely around the stage, which in some cases eliminates the concept of camera angle. I wouldn't be surprised if some of these stages were able to rotate as well.