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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.
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.
The ol' spinning mirror used to fake a real 3d display trick
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This was posted back in 2008. http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/06/27/1551232
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!
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.