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One Step Closer to Star Wars Holograms
An anonymous reader noted a USC research project that is coming ever closer to bringing the classic Star Wars communication holograms from Tatooine to Earth. There's nifty video and some high resolution pictures of Tie Fighters projected into 3-D. Still no clear way to project it from an astro mech droid, but I'm sure that's coming.
I'm counting on the porn industry to invent that.
They have done some cool things to achieve the effect. Key problems to overcome were:
1. The mirror isn't. A regular rotating mirror would allow viewing from a narrow range of heights. The mirror they use is diffuse in the vertical direction, while acting like a regular mirror in horizontal direction.
2. How to get a fscking fast projector: they use a regular DVI stream, but encode multiple one-bit images into the components. That way a 16-bit-per-pixel stream gets you 16 binary frames per each DVI frame. With 200Hz refresh rate, that is 3200 monochrome frames per second. To decode the stream, they use a custom FPGA-based decoder between the DVI input and the DLP chip.
3. How to render the source material so that it looks good -- and do it in real time, too. They overcome various sources of distortion,
All in all, methinks this is worthy of re-publishing, even if it's stale. Very cool technology.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
Since you clearly want that thing in an enclosed box (I prefer my TVs to be of the less then lethal variety) It would seem to make sense to make that box a vacuum or at least low pressure, they were making some pretty massive CRTs right at the end of that tech so I imagine that this wouldn't be a problem. Ultimately thought I think that this just isn't practical and probably never will be, it doesn't scale very well, 60 fps would likely shatter the mirror, in most applications nobody would actually care to sit at the back and frankly it's a big spinning mirror in the middle of your office or living room.
I may agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to face the consequences of saying it.
But you can put it in a solid glass cylinder and spin it, you get more mass to spin but next to no air resistance and shattering would not be very likely