Slashdot Mirror
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.
which side is BEHIND the action when you are watching football in a stadium? There are certainly some good applications for this technology. Though just having a feature to watch replays at whatever angle you want would be a great addition to plain old flat panel tv.
It seemed to work just fine in the video.
"Seemed" is the operative word there. What they do is track the viewer's height and rotate the image along a horizontal axis to simulate vertical parallax. If you have two viewers, say a boy and his father, standing side by side, this system will display the proper image to both just fine. It projects one image to the boy, then at a later time in the scan cycle, it projects a different image to the father. However, if the boy is standing in front of his father, the system has to project two images at the same point in the mirror's scan cycle. It can't do that. Either they both see it from the boy's perspective, or they both see it from the father's perspective.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
So call me when this thing works without high speed movable parts.
That's probably what a lot of people said when power tools were invented. I've read about the attempts at different technologies to produce color televisions, including the mirror one. I think the problem with the mirror then would have been the huge size of the box; early CRTs (even in the '50s) were a lot deeper than later CRTs, and you would have had to have the CRT and the spinning mirror.
It seems to me that you could have a true holographic video screen if you could have a high enough resolution, backlit with lasers illuminating the difraction pattern on the screen. They may well be possible now, but I remember in a physics class in the late seventies even holograms using photographic film looked grainy. It was still cool having the film wrapped around a beaker with a laser shining on it, and the photo of the dice inside were true 3-D, you could look at any angle. This video reminded me of that.
Free Martian Whores!
I've always found the Star Wars holograms bizarrely low-quality. You'd think a galactic civilization with hyperspatial travel could build a better communication system than their blotchy, wavery, interference-prone monochromatic holograms. Perhaps they could invent 2D LCD television instead. They'd be lightyears ahead in image quality.