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Harrods Sells Holographic TV
beuh_dave writes "Harrods is selling a holographic TV, CLARO, for £15,000. The Holoscreen is a revolutionary holographic film which displays any image fed through a projector at a specific angle on to a transparent display. All other light is ignored. The result is a remarkably bright and sharp image quality - even in brightly lit environments."
This isn't really "holographic" in the sense of a 3D image in space, or a perception of a 3D image.
All it is is a screen that hangs in space (or supported by glass as in the site) and only shows images directed on it from a certain angle - from a projector sitting conspicuously on the floor behind it.
It's pretty, but hardly world shattering.
RST
Carry on. If you need me, I'll be in the holodeck.
Just
I like how 'Harrods' in the summary's URL is misspelt, but that it's a redirect to the real 'harrods.com'. Pre-emptive Slashdot Editor protection! :-)
Tedious Bloggy Stuff - hooray?
Rear projection onto a transparent screen. Kinda cool but not worth £15000, not by a long shot. It seems to me to be a case of them mixing "can do" up with "should do".
99 bottles of beer in 175 characte
It looks great. If money was no obstacle...
40" transparent screen !! nice : )
Does anyone want to bother looking up the term hologram in the dictionary....when I think of a holographic TV I don't think of a flat surface displayed onto a tangable object you could easily break if you breath on it the wrong way when it falls over.
When I think of a hologram I think of being able to throw my beer through my TV next time I see a horrible excuse of a football game...
this one is a better link to the currently /.-ed site..
I'll believe in it when I see it in John Lewis.
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
If it could me modified to only accept projected light from a given angle (grating or a very highly polarised filter perhaps?), sevaral projectors could be used to 'layer' screens into a 3d block display. Expensive, but for people who NEED high quality 3d displays then money is most likely not an object.
I was down there last week, and despite the fact that it's not actually 3D, as the "holographic" would suggest, it does look pretty cool. It basically looks like a sheet of glass with a TV picture hanging in the middle of it - it's bright enough to look good and sharp under showroom lighting, too.
Not sure it's worth the extortionate price tag for what's essentially a novelty toy, though.
sig:- (wit >= sarcasm)
From the article (which is rather lacking in technical details), the display sounds like a holographically-recorded diffractive optical element on a glass substrate. If so, I'm curious how they compensate for the dispersion intrinsic to the diffraction phenomenon (since selling a 15,000 quid monochrome display is probably not a commercially-viable option :-p). Also, since the display claims to be angularly selective (it has to be if it only accepts a specific projection direction), I wonder if it has a similarly selective viewing angle (like early LCD displays, which were only bright and clear at normal incidence).
"It take 9 months to bear a child, no matter how many women you assign to the job."
Pledge polish: £0.89
Duster cloth: £0.25
Squeegy mop accessory: £175.00
explaining to your parents how their new toy got smeared, priceless.
liqbase
It has been around for a while...
. html h tm
http://www.exn.ca/Stories/2003/03/18/56.cfm
http://www.anders-kern.de/presse/pr_holoscreen_en
http://www.innovations-vcs.co.uk/main/holoscreen.
You can buy your own one cheap here:
http://www.av-sales.com/html/svs_holoscreen.html
"Go to CNN [for a] spell-checked, fact-checked summary" -- CmdrTaco
Exactly.
:)
Holographic means that you are producing/storing a diffraction grating. It doesn't even mean it looks 3D (like the 3D laptop screens - they just have 2 images, that's not holographic).
Btw, my job is to make holograms
Its the "one way reflective material" thats the cunning part, and what you pay all the money for. The surface treatment of the glass 'screen' is what is holographic in this instance, not the image that is generated, which is just a flat TV image. The hologram is such that from your viewing angle, light just passes straight through the glass plate, but from the projectors angle, the glass is opaque enough for an image to form on it like a conventional screen rather than passing straight through like it does the window on a projector booth at a cinema). I don't think you could generate the 40" hologram at home as a DIY solution!
"hey Fred, if we get rid of the big box surrounding these old rear projection tv's, Jack the price way up and call em something fancy, I'll bet we can finally sell these things off"
"Great Idea Barney! Let's call 'em 'Hollow Graphic'. No! No! Wait! I got it Holographic! No one will know the difference!"
"Yea Fred there's a sucker born every minute."
"You got that right Barney. Now lets see what we can think up for all these foam tiles these old tv's came packed in."
"Wait a minute Fred! I already sold those to NASA as shuttle repair kits. You won't believe what they paid me for them!", Fred gives Barney a big High Five.
I'd like to know how much these devices will cost elsewhere. Harrods have a reputation for inflating prices above and beyond high street level. For example, a toy that costs £10 in every other shop is selling for £25 in Harrods. You are paying for the experience of shopping in the store.
Yeah, I've never seen Photoshop look as good!
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
The hook was it being video, apparently floating in the shop window. No wires, no frame, in was creepily like Picture-In-Picture for the real world.
In the brightly lit shop window the image was equally bright, whatever in the ceiling driving it was pretty powerful. The only evidence there was anything 'going on' at all, beyond a block of video floating in space, was two, nearly invisible, mono-filament lines holding up the sheet of plastic. Also from the sides of the shop window one could spot the edges of the plastic if one looked carefully at the edge of the bright moving distracting video (in short - not obvious at all.)
Uses aside from novelty value?
Well as many folks have noted this is just an improvement on the old frosted-sheet-of-plastic trick so anywhere that goes this can can too. Places where you want a display with the only accessible part being a bit of plastic, like in public venues. Also spots where you don't want a lot of hardware 'hanging around' but want a cleaner look.
I could see this being popular for indoor stadiums, hanging off the edge of the deck above. Those fans are woefully under-served with TV during games (sarcasm).
Airports are gonna love this. Many have gone from banks of big CRTs squatting over folks to frames of flat panels, this will be the next step in their search for sleek 22nd century tax-paid coolness.
Designers, heck yeah! The mantra has been "thin is in", but they've still been vexed by cables and how to handle that awkward screen when it's not in use. Here is something that can mounted in the ceiling ($$$), the screen put in a convenient corner, and (with the house cleaner dusting it regularly) won't spoil the elegant lines of the room with evidence of proletarian TV tastes. I bet HGTV just ordered a shipping container of 'em.
For the rest of us? Unless you've got a real desire for 'floating TV' I bet most /.'ers would rather spend their money on more features & toys then just 'look it *floats*!'.
YMMV.
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.