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Real-Time Holograms Beam Closer To Reality
sciencehabit writes "It's not quite the flickering blue projection of Princess Leia begging, 'Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi, you're my only hope!' from the classic sci-fi movie Star Wars, but holographic projection has just beamed a bit closer to reality. Researchers in Arizona have devised a novel plastic film that can be used to generate holographic 3D images sent electronically from one location to another. The technology opens the door for everything from holographic surgery to movies that literally surround the viewer."
Holograms aren't about walking around the image (although they can be), they're about true 3D; 3D that uses all the visual cues for depth rather than just one (or 2D plus one more cue).
Today's 3D movies aren't really 3D, they're stereoscopes. Your right eye sees a slightly different image than your left eye, and your brain combines them.
With a hologram, if your eye focuses on something close in the image, things farther away blur, and if your eye focuses on something farther away the foreground blurs. With stereoscopy, the camera does all the focusing, which is why some people get eyestrain with it -- the parallax tells the brain an object is s certain distance away, while its focusing tells the brain it's a different distance.
But as I said, TFA wasn't clear whether or not it's a true hologram, as it mentioned several cameras arrayed aroud the subject. With a hologram, you have one camera and two lasers.
I wish I could find a more technical FA about this, it looks fascinating.
Free Martian Whores!
The same bit of plastic can be re-used for every image, and there are more videos that show the material being re-used. Check out the BBC coverage: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-11685582