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".""

Comments

Hey

[beatdown]

Doesn't look so impressive on my screen!

mmmm

[hjf]

so now I'll finally get to see that Leia message?

Re:mmmm

[Lispy]

Well, actually you would have seen the whole message if you wouldn't have gone to Toshi station to pick up some power converters. But then again much of your boring life as a moisture farmer would have been quite different and you wouldn't have been killed by a bunch of stormtroopers the day after you found that weird message inside that R2 unit. :)

Actuality Systems website.

[technix4beos]

You'll find the company here:

Actuality Systems.

Nice gift

[Mononoke]

a goldfish bowl like device that displays moving images in such a way that they seem to "float" within the display.

Does it say So long, and thanks for all the fish along the brim?

Re:Nice gift

[tiptone]

You spelled phish wrong...

hmm.

[toQDuj]

for the same price as one 25 cm 3d display, you can have 4 powermac g5's with dual 30" displays. that's 8 massive displays for the price of one 25 cm goldfish bowl..

In order to make it appealing they'd have to produce it for about 400 $ methinks. and connect it to a telephone :)
B.

Re:hmm.

[VoidEngineer]

yes, but your 8 massive displays still don't display true 3D. cost of two airplanes colliding > $40,000 cost of overradiating someone during cancer treatment > $40,000 cost of misdrilling an industrial 1,000ft oil well > $40,000 some applications just need 3D visualization, and all the processing power and 3D graphic cards and 2D monitors in the world simply won't allow you to effectively participate or utilize those industry applications if you don't have a real 3D visualization system. and stereogoggle systems won't let you walk around the object, unless you're working in a true CAVE environment; and if you're working in a CAVE, well, let's just say that the pricetag is well into the six-figure range by then, what with the need for at least 4 stereo-enabled video projectors, the control application, the tracking hardware, and the stereogoggles. your $400 pricetag shows that you're stuck in the consumer-market mentality. working at a hospital, i can vouch that we regularly buy equipment ranging from $20,000 to well over $1,000,000, (which is the price tag for a CT or MRI scanner). you can buy a used ultrasound scanner for about $40,000. and if we could, we would totally buy one of these things and put it into our reading room and have it be part of our post-processing, pre-surgical workflow procedure. $40,000 for a 3D visualization station to get a quick preview of your surgical target before operating? hells yeah, we would buy it for $40,000. the problem with the Perspecta is that it's not FDA approved yet, so meat-and-potato hospitals aren't allowed to buy it yet.

Re:hmm.

[toQDuj]

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.

Re:hmm.

[MyLongNickName]

What's the cost of a paragraph break? :)

I had a look at one of these once

[BabyDave]

The lady who was operating it said I'd meet a tall handsome stranger. Luckily she didn't ask me to cross her palm with $40k (that's a heck of a lot of silver).

Cool, but kind of small

[Anonymous Monkey]

I read the atricle, it sounds realy cool. But isn't 12cm kind of small for use in air trafic controll. "sorry, i can't see your blip because it's behind another blip" I think screen flicker isn't as bad of a thing as size.

Re:Pictures?

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.actuality-systems.com/index.php/actuali ty/products/photo_gallery

Wooow.

[fbjon]

"At the click of a mouse, the molecule disappears and is replaced by images of two airliners on a collision course."

Just think about it. You can change pictures at the click of a mouse!

Arrgh, Refresh rate!!

[corsec67]

From the article:

turns at 15 revolutions per second, sweeping out a solid white sphere.

I definitly don't want it until they get up 85 revolutions per second, and probably more. And I thought that 60 was horrible, imagine what 15 Hz would look like.

Re:Arrgh, Refresh rate!!

[Smidge204]

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=

Re:Arrgh, Refresh rate!!

[Heisenbug]

My newspaper refreshes, uh, zero times per second, and still doesn't hurt my eyes. The length of time the things *stay* fresh once refreshed is also relevant ...

look, but don't touch

[moviepig.com]

Like a giant spinning lollipop, the screen, encased in a transparent polycarbonate shell, turns at 15 revolutions per second, sweeping out a solid white sphere.

Just don't forget and reach for the pretty picture. . .

Hot damn!

[elgee]

Now I can see the back of my email messages!

But I will have to mortgage my house to do so.

Slashvertisement ?

[Animaether]

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.

Pictures (flat)

[BoneOfconTroll]

pictures:
http://www.actuality-systems.com/index.php/actuali ty/products/photo_gallery (old-fashioned flat, not 3D)

How does it work? A spinning screen, must be transparent I guess... what's the sci-fi sphere for?

Has to remain small scale for now...

[A Dafa Disciple]

The product in TFA is only 25cm in diameter, and if the featured image of the display is up to scale, then its display dome is going to be about 20cm in height. I can't imagine the display of this thing can be too good from underneath with the bottom of this device in the way. It is also stated in TFA that, in order for this thing to work, the screen on the inside has to spin at 15 revs/sec.

You can imagine the complexity of this device as it grows in scale. Even having a version of it at double the width and height is going to cause issues in trying to control the stability of all of its components. The velocity of the outermost edge of the screen (closest to the enclosing dome) is going to increase significantly as the device increases in size. All the while, you're creating a tornado within the dome.

I'm afraid that large scale versions of this device are going to be infeasible in functionality, production, and especially cost (this baby version costs 40 grand) as many complications are going to arise.

Re:How does this work?

[njcoder]

"I still can't figure out how this gives the appearance of 3D. Can someone explain this for the physics-challenged?

Take a flashlight. Tie a string to the end, go out at night and spint it around really fast by the string. It looks like a circle. That's basically it.

Movie

[panxerox]

I dont know why it sounds like a jet taking off but heres a movie

Old idea, technology not there yet

[oren]

I recall reading about such a system in the late 80s or early 90s. It was made by TI and was much more ambitious - think a 2m x 2m x 1m tank used for air traffic control.

This ones looks more practical, even if much less useful. At 15Hz and a mere 200x768x768 pixels, it is requires a mere 1/3GB but a whopping bandwidth of 5GB/s, and the quality is like that of a Dr. Who prop. Scale it up to 512x1048x1048 at 60Hz and you'll need an acceptable 1.5GB of memory but unrealistic 90GB/s memory bandwidth to drive the thing.

While this might be possible to resolve using massively parallel interfaces or something, I bet we'd still need Moore's law to hold for another decade or two before the quality of this type of display can rival that of current 2D ones.

In the meanwhile, this will remain a gimmick or be limited for very special applications where the low quality is acceptable (hint: this probably rules out medical applications :-)

It's like a lathe...

[TheCulturedRedneck]

A spinning display will finally justify our IT depts aversion to neck-ties. Now if we can just find a good excuse for hygeine...

Wow! That was _SO_COOL_!!!

[Lord Bitman]

In 1998, when I saw it on "C|Net".

Volumetric display without rotation

[geordieboy]

Here's an idea. Instead of providing a surface to scatter off by rotating a surface in space, fill a vessel full of some gas and focus two lasers at the point you want to scatter the light. Arrange for the freqencies of the two beams to add up to the frequency of a transition from the ground state of the atoms in the gas to an excited state. Photons should be produced where the beams intersect. Then you could make an image by just scanning through the volume intersecting the beams in a grid. Conceivably color could be provided with a mixture of gases and various lasers.

Size isn't an issue

[Dog135]

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?

Plane safety & PS3

[Dog135]

If you want practical 3D displays for something like an airport, you CAN use stereo goggles along with a trackball to rotate around the y axis. A setup like that would work well sitting at a desk, rather then this setup which would require everone standing around the center of the room, getting in each other's way. (Or each person with their own table to walk around)

Stereo goggles only require 2 3D graphics cards, which can easily be run by a single computer, and they end up giving you more freedom, since you can rotate an object quicker with a knob (or trackball) then you could walking around the display.

So why haven't they done this yet? Price sure isn't an issue. Though the price of reprogramming their systems might.

It may be because they want them to be able to see other stats other then just the view of the planes. But if they give multiple views on a single "screen", then use a device like the Nostromo SpeedPad to switch between them, then they'd have just as much control as they have now. Left hand on the screen controls, right hand on the rotation knob.

3D technology has been around for a long time. The problem isn't with the hardware, it's with the software. Hopefully, that's why the PS3 has two screen outputs: for 3D graphics in games. (If the PS3 has built in 3D goggle support, I'm getting a 3rd mortgage)

Re:How does this work?

[Infinityis]

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.