Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

One Step Closer to Star Wars Holograms

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the help-me-obi-wan dept.

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.

22 of 122 comments (clear)

  1. Wow. Just... WOW! by mcgrew · · Score: 2, Informative

    TFA is amazing. It doesn't go into great detail into how the thing works, but it gives an ok general outline, and the video is cool as hell (glad they imbedded it here).

    I can't wait until these replace standard monitors and TV sets. The only drawback is saying goodbye to flat TVs, but that's a small price to pay.

    I WANT ONE!!!

    --
    Free Martian Whores!
    1. Re:Wow. Just... WOW! by purpledinoz · · Score: 2, Insightful

      I'm counting on the porn industry to invent that.

    2. Re:Wow. Just... WOW! by MadnessASAP · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.
    3. Re:Wow. Just... WOW! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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

    4. Re:Wow. Just... WOW! by jlf278 · · Score: 2, Interesting
      "Who wants to sit BEHIND the action? People will only use one side as they always have."

      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.

    5. Re:Wow. Just... WOW! by PolygamousRanchKid+ · · Score: 5, Funny

      Actually, some of the first color TV designs used spinning mirrors: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_TV

      I don't think I would want 40" of glass spinning at 20Hz in my living room. Shrapnel.

      That's what a bunch of engineers at RCA thought, when they pushed for an all-electronics solution, without mechanical stuff.

      So call me when this thing works without high speed movable parts.

      Oh, and disclaimer, my father worked for RCA, and told me a lot of funny stories about the birth of color TV. During one of the first tests, transmitting a color picture of a fruit bowl from RCA's research site in Princeton to New York city, one of the engineers painted the banana blue. The folks at the receiving side fiddled with their color adjustments, and announced: "Well, the banana looks ok, but all the colors on the other fruit are wrong."

      Of course, they had tried to adjust on the banana first. Even back then, nerdy geeks did nerdy pranks!

      --
      Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
    6. Re:Wow. Just... WOW! by mcgrew · · Score: 2, Interesting

      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!
    7. Re:Wow. Just... WOW! by Tacvek · · Score: 2, Informative

      So this is a volumetric style display. It can only display objects within its volume. However full volumetric displays this display has only natural horizontal parallax. It can fake vertical parallax using head tracking. It does have one conceptual advantage over proper volumetric displays, namely that it does not require that you can always see through to the back of he shape, but it should be able to emulate that if desired.

      - - - -

      Let me attempt to create a classification system for 3D display technology.

      Volumetric refers to any technology that is restricted to displaying an image within some fixed size area. It cannot show things like stereoscopic movies. Volumetric displays have natural parallax in both directions, so can be observed correctly by any number of viewers. They can be viewed from any direction, except that equipment may obscure the views from some direction.

      Some examples:

      A pseudo-volumetric display is one that can only display in a fixed volume, but fails to meet the one of the requirements of a volumetric display, such as having only natural parallax in one direction, not being viewable from all directions, or only being able to display points on the exterior of the volume.

      Examples:

      • The display of this article, since it lacks natural vertical paralax.
      • This Sony 3d display that lacks natural vertical parallax: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lAS55_RngoQ
      • Certain types of holograms meat this definition. they have natural parallax in both directions, but can only be viewed from a limited number of angles.
      • The following device based on a a structure of rotating LEDs. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oLygWkHo9nw This is pesudo-volumetric only because this particular device can only show things on a sphere, and a ring around the sphere. It also does not let you see the far side of the shape. It is entirely possible to build a full volumetric device using the same technology.

      Now we have the remaining technology. These pretty much always use one or more flat screens, but that is not a requirement.

      A very familiar technology is 2D projection . This is the projection of a 3D image on a 2D surface. This is what we used to mean when we talked about 3D video games, for example. I don't think any examples are needed here.

      Now before I go on to talk about additional display types, I should define some terms.

      Autosteroscopic indicates that a display gives a stereoscopic image without the need for glasses, goggles, etc. There seems to be no standardized term for the opposite, whIch i will call variosteroscopic

      Semi-Immersive means that the view changes depending on the observers position. I mean this beyond parallax. Think of a display acting like a window, so if you stand to the far left or far right you can see different things, while only parallax would give stereoscopy, but you would see the same image from both sides of the display.

      Fully-immersive has not just a single window, but surrounds you, or seems to, anyway. VR goggles that track head movement and rotation can supply this kind of display. Volumetric displays that can be walked through also qualify. Later I will discuss how the holodeck fits in.

      Now we can get on to our display types.

      Variosteroscopic, non-immersive displays. These should be very familiar. They are what mov

      --
      Stylish sheet to fix many problems in Slashdot's D3: https://gist.github.com/801524
    8. Re:Wow. Just... WOW! by ManlySpork · · Score: 2, Informative

      Hz= /second RPM = /minute Just a small correction.

  2. Old news... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    The display was shown at the SIGGRAPH 2007 Emerging Technologies exhibition in August 2007 in San Diego, California, where it won the award for "Best Emerging Technology".

    Way to keep up, Slashdot.

    Actually if I felt like searching I'm sure I could find this same story posted years ago.

    1. Re:Old news... by BobMcD · · Score: 4, Informative

      The display was shown at the SIGGRAPH 2007 Emerging Technologies exhibition in August 2007 in San Diego, California, where it won the award for "Best Emerging Technology".

      Way to keep up, Slashdot.

      Actually if I felt like searching I'm sure I could find this same story posted years ago.

      I think this tells us something about the internet as an informational medium. Old news, but how many of us heard of it for the first time today? I know I never saw the 2008 posting, nor would I have frequented whatever site that link is from. Makes you wonder how many things, neat or otherwise, are simply lost to a digital wasteland.

    2. Re:Old news... by bill_mcgonigle · · Score: 2, Funny

      I think this tells us something about the internet as an informational medium. Old news, but how many of us heard of it for the first time today? I know I never saw the 2008 posting, nor would I have frequented whatever site that link is from. Makes you wonder how many things, neat or otherwise, are simply lost to a digital wasteland.

      Hey, now, around here you're supposed to get viscerally angry when a non-optimal event occurs. Check that introspective, mellow attitude at the door, mister!

      --
      My God, it's Full of Source!
      OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
  3. Nothing new by OzPeter · · Score: 4, Informative

    The ol' spinning mirror used to fake a real 3d display trick

    --
    I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
    1. Re:Nothing new by camperdave · · Score: 2, Informative

      Well, because there is only horizontal parallax, and not vertical parallax for one thing. If you had an image of a pair of dice behind a playing card you could move left or right to look behind the card to see the dice, but you could not move up to look over the card to see the dice.

      --
      When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
    2. Re:Nothing new by camperdave · · Score: 2, Interesting

      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!
  4. Cutting edge 2007 technology! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

    Glad to see it's on the fast track to the marketplace with the whole second ./ posting in three years....

  5. Dup! by spribyl · · Score: 3, Informative

    Possibly of a dup from a couple of years ago. I would verify can't be bothered searching or getting to the site.

    1. Re:Dup! by NewmanKU · · Score: 5, Informative

      This was posted back in 2008. http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/06/27/1551232

  6. Not new, but nevertheless cool by tibit · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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.
  7. Not NEWs by DaveV1.0 · · Score: 2, Informative

    I saw this two or three years ago on the Discovery Channel.

    --
    There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
  8. Vuvuzelas by EnsilZah · · Score: 2, Funny

    If you view it on Youtube they've conveniently added a button that adds the sound of vuvuzelas, if that makes it more authentic.

  9. Not exactly shooting for the stars by Citizen+of+Earth · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.