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Perspecta Walk Around 3D Display
Spinneyhead writes "New Scientist reports on the Perspecta display, a goldfish bowl like device that displays moving images in such a way that they seem to "float" within the display.
"To display the image, software inside the Perspecta chops a 3D model generated by the computer into 198 separate pieces, like slices of cake, which are then projected onto the screen in quick succession by a graphics accelerator that feeds image slices to an optical system mounted below the screen. The result looks to the viewer like a 3D image composed of 100 million "volume pixels" or "voxels".""
You'll find the company here:
Actuality Systems.
user@host$ diff
http://www.actuality-systems.com/index.php/actuali ty/products/photo_gallery
This is hardly new or innovative. I'm pretty sure the company itself has been mentioned before as well.
Projecting images onto a rotating plane or helix is old stuff.
http://www.actuality-systems.com/index.php/actual
How does it work? A spinning screen, must be transparent I guess... what's the sci-fi sphere for?
I don't want to sell you death sticks.
You can project on both sides of the disk, though. Since one spot gets sweeped by two edges per revolution, that's effectively 30 refreshes per second.
Better than a normal television.
=Smidge=
Well, true 3d is something we'd all want, I agree with you there. but there are other ways of displaying dimensions, for instance by using perspective and shading.
The airplane scenario does not hold, since current displays in control towers have been shown to be adequate. yes, it is cool to have a 3d image of the skies above, but you'd constantly have to move around the screen to see where it is in all three dimensions.
I have also found that displaying a molecule can be done sufficiently well, by rotating the molecule or by using stereoscopic views.
I seriously doubt that 3d displays will make a serious contribution in hospitals soon, since the images gathered by the equipment are too high in resolution to show and contain too much information in most cases to show in 3d (i.e. an artery blockage is too small to see on a 25 cm rotating display showing a cerebral MR angiography). Especially since the transprarency/depth cannot be set and thus too many arteries will be seen, distracting from that which is important.
What I'd give serious money for is automated highlighting of regions of interest in medical imaging. look at, for instance at the ph.d. thesis of Bart van Ginneken, 2001, Utrecht University.
B.
Every experiment which ends in a big bang is a good experiment.
If you look, that is because they are INSIDE an aircraft. Dumbass
What exactly is the benefit of a refresh rate faster than persistane of vision? Does my brain somehow "know" that there's more data there, even though I can't see it?
I know modern multi-sync displays have taught people that higher refresh rates look better (i.e. have less flicker and may be brighter), but that's a limitation of multi-sync displays, not of the lower refresh rate. Multi-sync phosphors are designed to work at up for 120 Hz, and simply do not have the perisistance to stay lit at 60 Hz. Take a look at a good old fixed-frequency monitor sometime and you'll understand.
Being able to support a bunch of input modes is great -- high-end home theater gear all does that. But it also re-process the data to match the limited set of output modes, rather than trying to sync a 42 Hz LCD to a 59.97 Hz signal.
Basically, this is just a spinning projecter & screen. To make it bigger, just build it with a bigger screen and brighter projecter. The rest of the hardware and software would remain the same.
As a side note, the flicker probably comes from viewing the back of the screen when it's turned away from the viewer. They need to add a second screen & projector to the back of the first.
So, any guesses on how long before we see "porn bowls" 6 feet high projecting full sized 3D porn?
"That's so plausible, I can't believe it!" - Leela
Just be careful, because if you somehow end up moving the flashlight back and forth in a straight line, it looks like a lightsabre, and that could be quite dangerous.