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Mind-Blowing Interfaces On Display At SIGGRAPH 2009
An anonymous reader writes "Tech Review has a roundup of some cool, experimental new interfaces being shown at SIGGRAPH 2009, underway in New Orleans this week. They include an amazing 'touchable holograph' display, developed by a team in Japan, which uses an ultrasound device to simulate the sense of touch as the user grasps objects shown in 3D. The other ideas on display are Augmented Reality for Ordinary Toys, Hyper-Realistic Virtual Reality, 3D Teleconferencing and Scratchable Input Devices. If this is the future of computers, sign me up."
The conference has also seen the release of OpenGL 3.2 by the Khronos Group.
From TFA: "A cluster of PCs is needed to perform the necessary image capture and 3D modeling." HA! Suck on that Mac!
I judt got a nre Kinesis keybiartf so please excusr ant egregiou typos.
So, you can actually feel something when you touch the hologram?
3-D PORN.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
Rimmer will be delighted!
Brain surgery - it's not rocket science!
Ever since I first heard of it I've thought augmented reality is going to be big some day. It's not much more than a toy right now (watching the video, it was clear that there's still a long way to go before it reaches it's full promise), but someday it'll be there. At my last job we used a lot of virtual reality modeling to do experimental training programs (learn to weld without real fire kind of stuff). Augmented reality will be so much better for this kind of thing. Think about it. A welder uses a real (modified) torch on a real piece of metal, but his goggles show the metal heating up and reforming. Or combine it with the tactile stuff from the other example and surgeon uses a "real" scalpel in a real operating room, but sees and feels a virtual patient. You could learn and practice very complicated procedures this way.
We're no where near being able to build holodecks, but between this tactile display tech and augmented reality we may not have to. Use the real world as your backdrop, put in real things where ever appropriate, and only simulate the stuff that you actually need to interact with.
I don't need a million points of light, just two points of multi-mode fiber and a 10 Gig-E router.
I don't really want a display that will cause an explosion in my mind, I'm kinda attached to it...
And scratching feverishly at one's trousers in the middle of the important meeting is better than manually switching the phone off because.... ?
So, you can actually feel something when you touch the hologram?
3-D PORN.
. . . just hope that you can't catch something when you touch . . .
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
I couldn't really tell from the video, and the article didn't specify. Are the touchable holograms 3D, or are they just 2D images floating in mid-air? I suspect the latter. Still impressive, though.
As we all should know from STNG, the 3d touchable hologram is probably the most dangerous entertainment system ever created. The doors never let you out, the holographic characters become sentient, the safety protocals NEVER work and it opens a rift up to places where holographic characters evolved naturally, so they promptly invade. STOP NOW BEFORE IT'S TOO LATE!
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
I tap my desk all the time, just as a habit. Wouldn't want my cell phone to interpret that the wrong way -- or, if not my cell phone, perhaps somebody else's. And I wonder about somebody entering the room with a heavy step, or scuffing their feet... could be weird.
I remember ïseeing Apple's voice recognition demo'd years ago (on a Mac IIfx! yikes, that's old) and the presenter had to address the computer each time. "Computer, close the window. Computer, open Microsoft Word." Etc. Somebody in the audience asked him how that would work in a shared, open, noisy office environment, and he didn't know. He suspected that you couldn't use it on more than one computer, or you might end up directing somebody else's machine to do stuff. "Computer, shut down." Oops. Might the same be true of a scratch interface?
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First, they'll set this up on PCs at home. Then it'll be laptops. Then, netbooks.
The next thing you know, you're gonna have to dodge a frigging mindfield of idiots walking around having orgasms (cmon, you KNOW this thing is gonna be used for porn) because wearable computers takes off.
Sent from your iPad.
I made it SIGGRAPH last year, but not this year. Its GEEK heaven. SIGGRAPH makes me aware how inadequate current video technology is. Do not be deceived by current large screen HD TVs - technology can do so much better.
In a nutshell, perfect video technology would be "indistinguishable from looking outside of a window on a sunny day". Thats what human visual systems are designed for. I've seen some experimental systems at SIGGRAPH that start to approach this quality. I hope it doesnt take 40 years to commercialize this like HDTV. I would love to see a theater movie where it felt like I was looking through a window at another world.
Resolution is probably the best aspect of current video. Beyond about 2,000 scan lines and 4K horizontal pixels, you reallly cant see more, unless it is a very large screen.
Contrast is perhaps in worst shape. The most impressive videos are those that have contrast ranges over a million, preferably over a billion. Super dark shadows and bright light source appear real then. The best monitors at Best Buy have contrast ranges in hundred thousands, but many are under a thousand. Different contrasts are very noticeable viewing screens side-by side. Sony has an experimental Organic-LED screen with a million contrast that starts to look realistic.
Current video only fills about half of the human perceptual color space. I've seen six-primary-color systems at SIGGRAPH that approach 80%-90% of the color space. They are very impressive when looking at nature and artwork. Compare a work of art and its best conventional video display and the color inadequacies will be immediately apparent.
Least is important is 3D in my opinion. It does make things look more real when you look through a window.
A big issue with enhanced video is that its not just the display device, but the whole video system. You need a camera, a signal representation, coomunication bandwidth, and recording devices that support all the enhanced features. You really cant shoe-horn it in existing systems.
Somehow I don't think it's minds that this display will be blowing when it finally reaches the consumer.
Not to knock the hologram, but that looked too limited to be very promising. The augmented reality has a lot more promise, considering its only been a few years since we got Haar Cascades for object recognition, and we've already got real-time facial recognition. Screw laser tag, I'm waiting to fight alien baddies.
Imagine real life way-points for GPS navigation, or mid-air big screen TVs, or general awesome HUD display. A single pair of badass augmented reality glasses could replace all of your monitors (TV, computer, etc) it could give perfect directions (follow the magic glowing green line) virtual computer terminals (say, via an Airport network computer) floating text bubbles for deaf people, insta binoculars, glorified porn, etc.
"Sorrow is better than laughter, for by sadness of face the heart is made glad." [Ecclesiastes 7:3]
Can't wait till I can work by just scratching my a$$!
As awesome as these are, I can see where the bottleneck is: display technology.
These are all cool, but what we really need is the same thing we've needed for a while: a way to produce a good image and shovel that into our visual centers. That augmented reality game will only really be fun if we can wear a pair of lite glasses or point some device at our retina that will produce a display that will both exceed 640x480 and not fry our rods and cones.
The guy with the $5000+ HMD(likely with a lifespan measured in months, too) glued to the Martian construction helmet shows how far we still have to go in terms of personal and wearable display tech.
I can scratch my butt or something else to make stuff happen? Awesome!
What advantage does it have over voice recognition? It seems to be the same or similar underlying processing.
The first example, I seen a long time ago. A very bad hologram effect that really has little practical use. So, they added motion detection to it. Coupling TWO existing techs is not that mind-blowing. I would have been impressed if the hologram was either bigger, or more involved or the motion tracking had displayed something more. The ultra-sound for touch again has been done, it has also been tried with air, but really, if this is the future, then the future is still decades away.
The augmented reality TOY is a joke. Augmented reality MIGHT be worth something but this game is a pathetic example of it. Come on, we HAVE had laser games for YEARS. Also toys that shoot REAL (foam) rockets. Who is going to bother with a game where a simple cowboy's and indian's game takes this long and costs a fortune? Someone should give these guys a pc or console. Shooters have been done, both in the physical and virtual world and with a LOT more excitement.
The virtual reality... well, what is new this time? We seen this display for ages and for reason the 3d world always seem rather subpar to what a common console could render last year. So, I am in it. Useful for design but the future? Only for designers.
The 3d teleconfericing is even worse. Oh goodie, lets do away with ordinary monitors and beamers for quality video and instead buy a no-doubt expensive device that has a spinning plate in it and a huge black cowling, all that so we can see ONE face and nothing else.
And the scratching... that is just pathetic. I thought at first that it make a wall into a touch surface. Capable of detecting the POSITION. But no, this can just detect some sound. This is no more then the most basic voice control software provided over a decade or two ago. Record a sound and if that sound is repeated again with in certain parameters, a command is triggered. WHOO! That is the future! Oh wait, no it isn't. Can you imagine how many times you will either scratch wrong or do it accidently. Every time you bump your coffee-cup, your phone shuts-off.
All the above techs are somewhat intresting, but the "mindblowing" bit in the headline blew it for me. This stuff ain't mind-blowing. Just barely worthy of idle.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Using ultrasound is not a very good idea because at the power levels required to make you feel it, it generates a lot of heat, which could cause permanent tissue damage. Wonder why the doctors use that gel when they do a sonogram? It's not to make the surface smooth for gliding, but to cool the skin because ultrasound generates a lot of heat even at such low power levels that you can't feel. If you have osteoporosis and use an ultrasound device for massage, you could end up with heat induced bone fractures.
Go apple!
The IBM PC was a popular personal computer of the time, and thus many other companies cloned its architecture.
Then wouldn't it be called "Lenovo-compatible" since 2005?
I've been to Siggraph a number of times. There are always a lot of creative display devices, virtual reality setups, 3D displays, etc, so that doesn't surprise me. But the scratchable input device is actually really cool: I wish I could get ahold of the source code for that one. Just imagine what you could do to automate your house:
1) Put one in your favorite TV chair and get rid of the remotes
2) Get rid of locks and door handles. Only the correct tap or gesture on the wall opens the door. When you've got friends over, you can semi-quote Back to the Future: "Door handles ? Where we're going, you don't need door handles..."
I went back to this page to see if there had been any responses to my post. But I couldn't see it at all. There wasn't even a link to it beneath the thread, nor to the other response made by someone else.
>> "the advanced companies were a real stickler for 24-bit per color channel standard."
Actually, it was 24-bit color - that's 8 bits per channel (3 channels x 8 bits = 24 bit color). The pitch was that was all the human eye could discern. Of course, when you manipulate it, you get rounding errors, leading to banding in the sky, etc.
Right now, high end dSLR cameras only do 14-bits per color channel. And that's pretty darn good.
Place nail here >+