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3D "Crystal Ball" Monitors

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the sure-why-not dept.

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..."

6 of 304 comments (clear)

  1. photos by sstory · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  2. The best 3d display I've seen was by bolthole · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    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 ;-) 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.

  3. More Information and schematic by LiquidCoooled · · Score: 5, Informative

    here have fun...

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    liqbase :: faster than paper
  4. In my day... by LordByronStyrofoam · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

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    Slashdot's name? When my compiler sees /. it generates a warning about a badly formed comment.
  5. Re:Ahh... I can finally gaze into my crystal ball. by gmuslera · · Score: 5, Funny

    "I see your future... and its full of spam!"

  6. not new by zejackal · · Score: 5, Interesting
    This isn't really new stuff. Back in my freshman year of college I got interested in volumetric displays. I came up with some ideas and found out that someone had already done it. I forget his name, but he was a polish scientist working for the navy making volumentric displays for submarines. My first idea, and also this gentlemen's was to use a spining helical surface that rotated through 180 degrees and iluminate it with laser beams deflected from a spinning mirror. That was 10 years ago... and he had working models.

    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.