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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..."
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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 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.
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
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)
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!
Hmm... This seems all too familiar.
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)
wouldn't that mean you have no depth perception?
Not really. There are a number of ways to interpret three dimensions. One is to use two devices slightly distant from each other on which a single three dimension image is projected from two different angles (i.e. two human eyes.) The other is to move a single two dimension device over time (time is a dimension after all) to make 3 dimensions. So, unless the original poster stands completely still all of his life, he can still sense depth and the device in the article wouldn't be as unuseful as expected.
here have fun...
liqbase
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.
This will be very helpful for people who do medical and scientific imaging.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Don't know why you bothered posting, The Wicked Witch of the West had one of those things quite a while ago.
I've no idea. I've been blind in one eye for my entire life so wouldn't really know how people with 2 working eyes "perceive" depth. I have no problems telling the differences between 2D (real world) and 3D (as seen on a TV screen/poster) objects, if that helps.
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!
I can't wait to see the Blue Sphere of Death. :)
But seriously, what a cool gadget.
Paul
"I see your future... and its full of spam!"
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?
--
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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
iirc, SGI's used to (still do?) have an optional file manager that was 3d based. looked kinda like that one in jurasic park (might have been that one for all i know).
Yes, they made it just for the movie. For a long time they proudly distributed the entire thing for free (though only for IRIX) on their website. I don't think it exists there any more, but those of you lucky enough to own an SGI box can get it here.
Well, you could always do hidden surfaces removal .. err, wait
Pretty interesting. I found a good description (and how to do it yourself) here.
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?
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
here almost a year ago Friday May 24, @02:44PM 2002
The Only Person Willing to be Me is ME!
...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.