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3D Display, No Glasses Required
Shibatch writes "Hitachi, Ltd has developed a 3D display called Transpost which can be viewed from
any direction without wearing special glasses. 3D movies can be seen as floating in
the display. Also, 3D movies captured at other places can be shown on the display
in realtime. The principle of the device is that 2D images of an object taken from
24 different directions are projected to a special rotating screen. They also
developed a camera which can capture images from 24 directions simultaneously." The pictures are interesting, but ... translations, anyone?
Help me Obi Wan Kenobi, you're my only hope.
It's just strobe interference with the cameras!
I remember this earlier Slashdot article discussing a similar technology. How long before these things are commodity hardware?
I can't read japanese as well as I once could but I think it says, "Here is our video-capture of the opening scenes from Star Wars Episode IV"
The caption on the second link says, "Help us, Obi-Wan."
That's about all I can make out.
http://www.worldlingo.com/products_services/worldl ingo_translator.html
Of course not perfect translation, but should able to give some draft idea what it is talking about.
http://hhil.hitachi.co.jp/products/transpost.htm
now thats great: i am finally going to be in EVERY single picture i take with that camera. hooo, my folks are gonna like those slideshows big time!
just imagine, tele-surgery becoming standard, video calls to loved ones being more and more special, blind people missing out on something else and won't sombody think of the pr0no industry???
---- Design. Invent. Cheese.
the artist Dali played with lasers and 3d holograms in the eighties, of note was a woman in a rocking chair that just floated in thin air (about 6in tall) (red)
Old news, but the best article I've read on this yet is the New Scientistarticle from a couple of years ago in which they first (for me) described realtime rendering using existing games. Interesting stuff.
Basically its just layers of projected images, spinning around to give the impression of volume. Still really neat though.
PC Watch article (Japanese) with many pictures
MPEG movie 1
MPEG movie 2
It seems to me like a system such as this would be rather inappropriate for watching movies. For one thing, making a device any much larger than a normal-sized tube TV would start to get really impractical, as the spinny elements would start to generate a lot of noise (and you WOULD NOT want to be there if a large, high-speed spinning element broke off of its axis and started ricocheting about the room...).
Also, unlike conventional holograms, you would not be able to "touch" the image. Reach out to touch these images, and the rotate-o-thingy will lop your hand off.
I shudder to think of the safety (and power consumption, and noise) issues that would be involved in making a movie-screen-sized version of one of these...
Something like this is probably more useful for scientific and military visualization. I know it's corny, but think of the Star Wars-like 3D display in South Park, in the scene where Bill Gates gets shot by the army guy. Something like that display machine...
Honey, I shrunk the Cygwin
What kind of geek doesn't wear glasses
Used Babelfish and then paraphrased it so it wasn't as engrish:
:/
But from what I can read, I can tell you this:
The stereoscopic video display that can been seen from all 360 degrees is in development. Video can be displayed on the fly. - Hitachi, Ltd.
This time, Hitachi has developed a new stereoscopic video display that allows viewers to view it from all 360 degrees. With this technology, viewers can see a 3D picture as if the viewer was using special glasses. It is possible to enjoy this stereoscopic image which just floats in the air without special processing. In addition, using a special video recording system, it is possible to display the images in real-time. Through the network, the photograph is sent (along with positional vector details), and the image is displayed. Various applications in the field are expected as the new technology matures.
Only bothered to do the first paragraph, as what babelfish produces is really really bad engrish
# It's called 'Transpost'
# It uses LCDs and mirrors
It'll be much better if a native speaker translates for us.
Founder of Mirror Moon - Tsukihime Game Trans
Please, please, please, for the love of all that's intelligible, can people refrain from posting babelfish "translations".
It's okay for the odd word or phrase, but for a whole article, it's just wrong. Or, as babelfish would put it:
Please, for those the love for all the those that is understandable, can satisfy please of refrain of babelfish of the writing of the "translations" of the peoples. It is for the odd word or the approval of the sentence, but for a complete article, he is necessarily false. Or, babelfish that it puts...
evil math within Nature's Cubic Creation!
So you dont need glasses to see it, but I can imagine after squinting at 24 rotating mirrors projecting a fuzzy blob into a vague space just in front of your nose you soon *will* need glasses!
Baz
This won't be big until its actually useful for something other than technical visualisation. But it's still cool...
Transpost product homepage (Japanese w/ pictures) at Hitachi Human Interaction Lab.
Other products from this laboratory include Waterscape (English).
I really wonder how these images you can see in the tube are created.
I could imagine it's a kind of fog where the image is projected by the help of lasers or other strong light sources.
I don't think this technique is very helpful because it requires really bulky "Displays", returning a relatively small picture.
If this does ever want to become generally accepted, the viewing appliances have to shrink and return bigger pictures, perhaps by sacrificing quality over price and bigger pictures.
-huha
Holy crap. My cat already goes bonkers with the mouse pointer in 2D mode. 3D?! She's gonna friggin explode!
..........
... SLAM!!! Kitty head goes face first into hard cold monitor, while simultaneously knocking over a half can of warm Dr. Pepper all over my keyboard.
I can see it now...
She crouches down, eyes fixed on the Mecca that is my cursor, while time and space come to a stand still...
Eyes fixed, heart beating swiftly, she tactfully wiggles her butt, to confirm her primal instinct. This... this is her moment... her destiny...
She twitches her noes and squints her eyes, and runs off feeling sheepish, as I make a half ass attempt to clean off my keyboard with a dirty laundry, cause im to lazy to find paper towels.
From the article description and pics, this seems to be a relatively simple concept, but nicely implemented. Although I can't read the article, I'm guessing that the "3d" effect is a much better version of those "holograms" that appear to move when you tilt at different angles (e.g. Ken Griffey player appears to swing when you tilt his baseball card). But instead of 2-3 images on a flat card, you have 24 images on a cylinder. Needless to say, it's not "real 3D" as none of 24 images themselves have depth.
Some people mentioned a strobing projector around a rotating screen as being the method used here. I wonder if also some sort of projector facing upward from below could be reflected laterally in 24 directions by a 24 sided mirror.
They then go on to explain a little more about the technology. They take video feed from 24 different angles and then feed that into their projection system which I think is a number of projectors inside a single machine. They then project it upwards onto some sort of rotating screen/plate.
They then talk some more about how it's automatic and works in realtime over a network.
Lastly they just talk about how a color projector like this is possible and what some of the uses might be (business, entertainment). Then at the bottom, they define the terms "holography" and "hitachi human iteraction lab".
I am totally against this technology. Totally 100% vehemently abhorrent of it. If every 3d image requires 24 2d shots to create, this is going to make my porn image collection only one twenty-fourth of the size!
And now porn is going to take 24 times as long to deliver! For every 1 shot they want to get to the end user, the photographer has to do 24 times the work. Every second spent in the studio is a second that porn hasn't spent on my hard drive! BOYCOTT I SAY! BOYCOTT!
--
The last digit of pi is four.
The porn industry seems to jump on new technology a lot faster than "mainstream" industries, proving the effectiveness of new tech so the big boys don't have to take any inwanted risks. Look at multi-angle DVD's, they are only just starting to show up in genres outside of porn, and how long has the technology been around?
Making the moon less necessary since 1998.
Its a rotating screen which has a projector projecting a different image for each of the 24 rotations. Hence you can view an object from 24 different angles. You should be able to increase the number of viewing angles by increasing the frame rate.
Number of Angles * Desired Frame Rate = Required Frame Rate
So I suppose the projectors already doing 576 (24 * 24) frames per second! You could reduce the impact on the projector by having multiple projectors with some sort of high speed blanking plate to ensure they only project on their associated angles.
Sorry for rambling nature of post, just thinking of the top of my head...
One of the firs applications of this new tech could be immersive karaokes, where you can sing your favourite song among a living 3D projection of the real band (without the singer of course)...
;)
Just imagine, the *huge* market that there is in Japan for this kind of stuff: all those japanesse business men impersontating Freddie Mercury after work
Informative? How can 24 discrete views POSSIBLY be called stereoscopic? This is an interesting technique that could allow for 3D video conferencing if scaled up sufficiently, though I doubt it would ever make sense for dramatic enetertainment.
That was classic intercourse!
You may be moderating this as funny but that is the most serious/insightful comment you will see here.
If you think about it, it is going to be really hard to show scenery ie mountain landscapes on this screen - you can only show objects standing in a void - the demo piccies here show a man standing in the middle of nowhere. Think about Star Wars and Princess Leia standing in the middle of nowhere in R2's projection - there are no walls around her...
So if you think about it, the only real use for this are artificial landscapes like Air Traffic Control displays, and people.
Porn is _the_ killer app for this one.
The number of angles is dependant on the number of projectors since that is all that changes when you see something different. Your simply looking into a different projector.
unzip; strip; touch; finger; mount; fsck; more; yes; unmount; sleep
In this image you can see that only 1 projector is used. The 24 views are encoded in a single image which is reflected by 24 mirrors around the central rotating one. So to have a 24fps animation you only need a 24fps projector. The drawback of course if that the resolution is divided by 24. As the final display is quite small, it's better to have lower resolution but not dividing the framerate by 24!
http://www.computerworld.com/hardwaretopics/hardwa re/story/0,10801,69675,00.html
It's hard for thee to kick against the pricks.
.. if you've only got one eye, though.
If 3D ever become mainstream for computing environments, my big question is how we'll navigate it. You can't exactly move your mouse up and down through the table as it tends to leave big holes. Maybe an orientation-based thing a la Twiddler 1, or a POV button for vertical movement and rotation. It's something I haven't seen addressed at all, and if we want to get support for 3D computing then I think we need to start with some interesting ideas on how we'll use it.
And if you are not myopic, you will think you are when you are looking at Casper the Friendly Ghost bustin' a move...
${YEAR+1} is going to be the year of Linux on the desktop!
All the cameras involved would need to synchronize their frames ala time-based correctors we used to use for video editing, else you'd probably get some disconcerting flicker as you moved around it...
"Waste not one watt!" - CZ
Many people are dubious about 3D screens. This is understandable as there have been doezens of them and none has "made the grade"
The reason for this is simple: stereopsis is, while whiz-bang, is not "interesting". After the initial gee-whiz the grim reality of the lack of value added benefits for the cost always come into play.
Today the tag "3D" has a fuzzy meaning, but it is usually interpreted to mean mere stereopsis: artificial illusion created by presenting each eye a differing perspective of am in image.
The reason stereopsis fails is that it only provides a fractional increase in information, where as "holographic" (a misnomer) provides a full dimensions worth of information.
To explain it simplest: stereoptic images have one depth of focus, whereas a "holographic" image has thousands of "planes" of focus. A holographic image allows you to focus your eyes at different depths whereas a mere stereoscopic image keeps your eyes focused at one depth.
When it comes down to it, its about information density; fake stereroptic effects add no information. So we can conclude that "3D" technology won't ever become mainstream until true depth "holographic" imaging is available.
Bottom line: this screen is not worth its cost. Give us depth of field.
Either your images have to be very simple, or you need extremely powerful hardware, or the resolution sucks, or you're going to have to accept low frame rates.
I wonder how frame rate relates to the rotational speed of the projection surface.
Slashdot quality declines as the number of hot grits posts decreases. - Provolt's Law, Apr-09-2005
You probably mean Sega Time Travellert ter=T&game_ id=10124
http://www.klov.com/game_detail.php?le
which according to the klov entry uses a parabolic mirror to display a hologram image
I remember this game too, and yes it looked very cool
Learn about pinball machines on www.flippers.be
http://www.lemminginvestor.com/DDDpresentation.htm l
This'll bring back one of the weirder architectural designs from the 70's..the conversation pit...
Instead of sitting in front of the TV...people will sit around it...
Probably wouldn't work for sports though...at least not until they have a few crays laying around processing the every second of play to track an morph the images from 24 cameras all having to run at different levels of zoom...
Nice for soaps and sitcoms...Boxing matches...But football would be a little tougher...
"Helping to keep you two steps ahead of the Thought Police!"
I read the article (yes I read Japanese) and it's mostly a bunch of marketingspeak about their new method of capturing and transmitting images in realtime, which are displayed on LCDs screens in the imaging chamber. It isn't clear to me after just a quick read whether this is something they can do NOW, it sounds more like they think they CAN do this in the future. It also describes the process as stereographic, they make several comparisons to holograms but they don't say it IS a hologram.
For those wondering how this system works here is the actual article:
Viewers gaze at a live three-dimensional image produced with groundbreaking technology unveiled by electronics giant Hitachi Ltd. on Tuesday. Hitachi's device is the first in the world that can record and instantly display three-dimensional images from 360 degrees.
Up until now two steps were required: special filming using lasers and the intermediate process of physically recording the image, meaning that the image could not be seen at the same time as filming.
The circular viewing device stands about 2 meters high and is 40 centimeters in diameter. The image of the person being filmed is portrayed onto a high-speed spinning screen from angled mirrors.
When viewed from the side, the person's face can be seen and their back is visible when viewing the object from the opposite direction.
The person or object being filmed is surrounded by 24 mirrors and recorded with a camera. This recorded image is instantly transmitted to a projector in the viewing device. (Mainichi Shimbun, Japan, Feb. 24, 2004)
To see the picture, which is larger than the ones on the Hitachi site, go to Mainichi Daily News and in the lower right corner of the current picturce click 'More'. When the pop-up occurs click 'Next' to see the single picture and the text I just posted.
I hope this helps.
Hitachi Co. Ltd. (CEO: Etsuhiko Shouyama) has developed a novel 3D image display technology, which allows a 360 degrees view from any direction. The technology allows a viewer to enjoy a 3D image that appears to be floating in the middle of the air. With the proprietary camera system, one can take and view a captured real-time 3D image. The taken image can be sent over a network and played in distant places simultaneously --- this makes a totally new presentation style possible. The technology is expected to be use as a new image-based information system in various fields.
Holography has been a well-known method for playing floating 3D images to date. However, playing a 3D image requires preparation of an interference pattern (hologram), and this make real-time playing of a captured 3D image impossible.
Real-time playing of a captured 3D image will bring, for example, projection of 3D images of a person or an object in the air, which has appeared in SF movies, to the real world. As a new style in oversea business, discussion of a product design or a presentation to a customer can be made based on the image of a sample freshly made here in Japan.
The Hitachi Human Interaction Laboratory in the Hitachi Fundamental Research Center has developed the 3D image display technology that allows one to view a real-time 3D image floating in the air from any direction. This comes with a demonstration system, cylindrical 3D image display "Transport." The developed display technology has the following features.
(1) 3D image display by a simple mechanism
The system is based on simultaneous projection of the images of a subject taken from multiple direction onto a proprietary prepared rotating screen. In the experimental display "Transport," the images of the subject taken from 24 different directions are projected to (a) mirror(s) at the top by (a) LCD projector(s) set in the base. The projected images are reflected by the mirror(s) to 24 mirrors placed around the rotating screen, and further directed on to the screen.
(2) Real-time display of captured 3D image
The Lab developed a proprietary camera system that automatically produces images of a subject from 24 different angles. Directly sending the images captured by the camera system to the LCD projector displays the captured 3D image in real time. The captured image can be sent to a distant place by connecting the camera system to "Transport."
The developed 3D image display technology can handle both still and animated images with full colors and from computer-generated graphics to real image captures. The technology may find various applications in business and entertainment as a unconventional display system for 3D image presentation and information distribution in the ubiquitous era.
(Notes about *1) holography and *2) Hitachi Human Interaction Lab)
Left: Overviews of the display system (left) and the camera system(right)
Right: (top) "It appears to be floating in the air."
(bottom) "One can move around and see."
You are correct in this assertion. The infinite limit of this approach is a hologram. True holograms play out the 3-dimensional wavefront of light as reflected by the 3-dimensional object. Frames taken with a 2-dimensional camera are just that 2-d.
I interned at Holographic Studios with Jason Sapan in New York City. We would construct images like these using 16mm film frames and a cylinder of holographic film. This is similar to the technique in Logan's Run, but I don't think Jason did that one. This image type is called integral since it is an integral model of a 3-dimensional image kinda like sticking cheese wedges together to make a wheel of cheese. The wheel is round when you slap it together, but it is still an approximation and not a whole wheel. This design seems even worse than the cylinder hologram, because at least the cylinder can play out multiple angle truly at the same time.
As an experiment you can use a stereo pair of 2-d images and a real object. When you look at one of the stereo pair images with one eye you will see that it is flat. This is due to the scanning of a single eye as it looks at the scene. When you look at the real object with one eye you will see the foeveoal (center) scan of depth from the real object. That is why stereoscopy != depth. Reference "Practical Holography" by Graham Saxby for a more eloquent explanation.
This Hitachi display is not new technology and it has some problems, principally:
On the upside:
It would be most useful for applications such as air traffic control, etc.
It competes with the other autostereoscopic displays (the LCD shutter glasses will never break out of their nerd/medical/scientific-imaging market for social and multi-tasking reasons), of which there are only really 2 consumer-market viable architectures:
The other displays linked to in the comments, and various others not linked, are all variations on the parallax barrier approach. Again, not new. They have the benefits of:
They have the big downsides of:
The limited viewing angle practically requires most parallax barrier systems to use active head tracking systems, where the display identifies where your eyes are and retargets the imaging accordingly. This exposes the practical usefulness of the 3D image to a further potential degradation if the headtracking system is not spot on.
Sharp and Dresden both use parallax barrier. Dresden's is beautifully bright but its headtracking can unfortunately jump the image around very badly for some people -- speaking from experience, it is beyond unusable if you're one of the unlucky ones, the image is jumping inches in random directions on random sub-second intervals.
Another major disadvantage is the extreme difficulty of presenting a 2D image via parallax barrier systems, thereby sharply restricting its desktop market. If you want to write or read something, such as a spreadsheet or some code or a word document, you're out of luck -- you need another monitor.
The other approach has been developed by a single company comprising now 2 people (holographic artists) about 10-12 years ago. The Display:
I think that only projects a 2D image into 3D space. It looks like they are basically doing the trick of projecting on a thin laminar stream of fog. Although they don't call it fog, they call it "transformed air" because that sounds a lot cooler and more mysterious.
It does look pretty neat. But it's not 3D imagery.
"Obi ran, all my hope are belong to you. EKEKEKEKEKEKEK"
There's a few (very short) enlish news blurbs:
Ananova
Akiba live, which ananova mentions and links to.
It's kind of cute how they set it up at just there right height for a japanese person to read - 172.6cm.
Back at Cambridge University in England twelve years ago I saw a demonstration of a 3-D screen which did similar things.
Basically what they had was a high speed CRT, and in front of it they put an LCD-based filter and a lens system. The CRT showed consecutive images for multiple viewing angles, and the LCD filter worked in conjunction to ensure that only the correct images would be seen at the correct viewing angles. I can't remember the full details now (it was 12 years ago!) but the display did really seem to have depth and the images really did seem to jump out of it. They tried to ensure that when viewing the screen at a reasonable distance you would get different images for each eye. No glasses required.
The refresh rate wasn't astonishing, and the screen was only monochrome, but it was very effective. They were talking about making a colour version based on LCDs, but the big problem with using LCD screens back then was the switching time for the pixels.
I was seriously impressed by the demo I saw and have been waiting ever since for this to become a real product. I'm not holding my breath though - the amount of data required for 3D TV (or 3D movies) for these kind of screens is immense. Whilst modern digital satellite TV can carry hundreds of channels from a single satellite the same satellite would only be able to carry a handful of 3D broadcasts (if you want to ensure a decent 3D picture). I think you'd probably need something faster than Internet 2 for cable-based transmission.
One day though....
If you can walk around the thing and the steroscopic pairs change accordingly, how is that different from reality?
The two main differences are latency and multi-viewer capability.
When you move around a true 3D image there is ZERO latency. You move your head back and forth, you always see the right view and it's perfectly in sync with your viewpoint. Any system that has to track your head, and then generate a stereoscopic pair based on that tracking result is going to have some latency. The result is that the image seems to swim a little bit. And it doesn't take much latency to make many people get a form of motion sickness. (Consider with 60fps display you have generally at least 16 msec of latency, and trackers usually pile on at least another 10-30msec or so, at best. That's plenty to induce motion sickness in many people, and in those that don't feel sick, at least it is enough that the swimming of the image is obvious when you make quick movements of your head.
Second, with stereo pairs, only one person can get the correct 3D view at a time. So it kind of cuts down on the potential for use in a group setting. Not to mention that you have to track the viewer and/or wear special eye gear. That cuts down on the potential uses also. You can't, say, have a 3D kiosk that people can just idly walk by and be wowed by if they have to line up one by one and put on some kind of tracking head gear to see the effect.
So there are a number of real reasons why you'd want to have a real 3D image-generation device instead of a device that's merely stereoscopic. If you just want to sit in front of your monitor and appreciate 3D porn, then there's nothing wrong with stereoscopic images, and at $150 or so (compared to $50K) the price is certainly right.
I guess those guys must be Jesse Eichenlaub and Arnie Lagergren from DTI. Their displays have been discussed before.