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A Kinect Princess Leia Hologram In Realtime
mikejuk writes with this snippet from I, Programmer: "True 3D realtime holography is not only possible — it makes use of a Kinect as its input device. A team at MIT has recreated the famous 3D Princess Leia scene from the original Star Wars — but as a live video feed! It's a great stunt but don't miss the importance — this is realtime 3D holography and that means you can view it without any glasses or other gadgets and you can move around and see behind objects in the scene. This is more than the flat 3D you get in movies."
thats not any good
Nearly there, it is.
"Real holography" my ass. Unless I'm misinterpreting the video, what they're producing is a ~15 FPS red blob, with no 3D except what's captured by the Kinect. You're still going to see a flat image on the screen (and those on the left and right of the theater will get the same image).
In the next release her image will be replaced with Hayden Christensen in a George Lucas inspired M. Night Shyamalan-like twist.
That'll save Hollywood!
But I guess it is a start!
The first 2D electronic television displays had similar levels of performance. This is a tremendous achievement. If you want proper 3D - sans glasses - this is almost certainly how it will happen.
I know people will hate me for saying this, but in a way, it's better if everyone sees practically the same movie. If we're all seeing slightly different views, then we won't all have quite the same experience. I think there's something to be said for having a particular view of the scene intended by the director.
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I watched the video. The summary is very misleading - it's talking about where this may, someday, end up. Looking at the so-called real-time hologram, without foreknowledge you wouldn't be able to guess what was being reproduced, even if you were given 20 guesses. Someday this may end up as something cool - maybe.
This is only news because hacking the Kinect is currently a trendy topic in certain tech circles - so any Kinect-related story is getting airtime, no matter how immature (speaking tech-wise) and non-newsworthy.
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Early mechanical systems are probably a better analogy. Once we committed ourselves to electronic television, it was basically immediately quite good (heck, British 405-line system was promoted as High Definition; there are some recordings on YT, looking decently good)
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If you say so.
Oh My God, Yet Another Star Wars Release over the Horizon. Hide those news from Lucas immediately!
Fresh off the boat Alderaanians, you can spot 'em from a mile.
it's better if everyone sees practically the same movie
That's not even true of 2D movies though. Everyone notices different things in movies as it is, and directors often leave a lot of details to interpretation. Being able to walk around a scene is only going to change that a little. For a traditional theater though you're really only going to get a slightly different angle (if it gets to the point where you had large public 3D hologram theaters)
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
What's the point of wasting CPU and bandwidth on real time?
Perhaps their demonstration would be more impressive if they focused on actually generating a passable pre-rendered video first.
^^vv<><>BA
Came for Slave Girl Leia. Leaving disappointed.
Nobody sees the "same" fiction book as anyone else, since everyone imagines a printed scene differently.
I don't see a problem.
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I wish the video of the "hologram" was better. I didn't get any sense of 3d whatsoever. It looked worse then old mechanical TV. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=59_-Lj8uSO4
No, I will not work for your startup
Tis is a great advance, but closer to "Minority Report" family videos (bumped 2D) than "Star Wars" holograms (360 degrees hologram). Nothing that can't be solved with more Kinects and more GPUs. Good job, young padawans!
If we're all seeing slightly different views, then we won't all have quite the same experience.
You mean like a live performance, a baseball game, and everything else we experience in life?
3 fps, 80 scanlines, in the wrong color, against a black background. Genius recreation guys.
You're sending slow-ass plain text from one computer to another and you call this thing ARPANET? Genius idea, guys.
I dont really know if it would really work or not, but I've had this idea for an interferometer based "holo-tank" for over a year now.
(I really don't care if somebody steals this idea.)
The phenomenon of self-interference is the life-blood of traditional holography-- basically, one beam is split in a beam splitter, one of the resulting beams scans an object, while the other then interferes with the refracted light from the scanning beam as it exposes a photographic plate.
traditional holography
This stores the interference pattern on the plate, so that when it gets illuminated by laser light of the same frequency, a virtual 3D image of the scanned object gets produced.
That's basic holography; The idea I have in mind is quite a bit different:
Since this is slashdot at least some of you guys will be familiar with the micro-mirror arrays found in some modern DLP projection television sets, (For those that are not, here is an obligatory wikipedia link.) and probably some of you already know about multi-mode lasers for use in frequency combs. (Another obligatory wikipedia link.)
Essentially, you take the beam from a multimode frequency comb laser that is calibrated to produce a series of discrete frequency spikes within the visible light spectrum, and run it through a beam splitter, just like traditional holography.
However, instead of sending one beam to interact with a real object as the scanning beam, you direct BOTH beams onto DLP chips. These DLP chips reflect and refract the laser light so that the beams will have a very subtle phase incongruity when they intersect within a transparent medium. This causes the beams to interfere with each other and scatter at the point of intersection. By carefully controlling the beam lengths to be highly specific to the individual frequency spikes of the laser comb's beam, you can modulate the apparent "color" of the glowing 'dot'. (Or, at least I think you should be able to anyway.)
Now, if you "Scan" the two lasers over the DLPs, you should be able to use them to produce a purely computer generated holographic image, in something that would approach real color. (Would not be true real color, because of the discrete nature of the laser comb you are using.)
Due to issues of blinding people with the laser light, you would need to project the image inside of a transparent block of material, like high clarity glass or crystal, with some kind of beam trap at the far end-- however, this "tank" doesnt need to be very thick to theoretically produce a nice 3D object. I would think a mere quarter inch thick would be more than sufficient.
Someone call Uwe Boll!
Homonyms are fun!
You're driving your car, but they're riding their bikes there.
This might be real holography, but the illusory effect from the video game Time Traveler is still more impressive at this point.
Freedom is drinking a beer in the park when you're supposed to be at work.
This reminds me of some of the early attempts at television... also of equally lousy resolution due to bandwidth issues.
As mentioned in the article, true "holographic" representation of an environment would take an insane amount of processing and bandwidth. There are some "tricks" that can sort of simplify this issue after a fashion and still not require stereoscopic glasses or anything fancy on the part of the viewer, but even those have their limitations.
Making a credible Volumetric display is the real trick... something several people have worked on to some degree or another. I can only hope that eventually something will actually happen with the technology but in the meantime it is still and experimental toy and not something for serious work... yet.
This attempt here is nothing more than the equivalent of Felix the Cat as used by Philo Farnsworth on some of the early broadcast television tests.
please no realtime 3d as in jenny craig-style carrie fisher!!! i am insensitive , true, but really !! ....people.... think of our eyes.
Looks like shi%.
I understand the importance, but maybe it was a little too early to make this public.
You're sending slow-ass plain text from one computer to another and you call this thing ARPANET? Genius idea, guys.
Really no points for him? Mod him insightful ppl, he's right.
It's usually a hater that starts bagging on proof of concept limitations in their specs.
3 fps, 80 scanlines, in the wrong color, against a black background. Genius recreation guys.
The air is fresher outside of the basement.
-AI
For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion
Btw, they are up to 15 fps now, per http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2011/video-holography-0124.html
so, snarky unimpressedness = fail
I realize that this is bleeding-edge technology, but I think they need to do a bit better than an amorphous red blob.
The British Scophony system was a mechanical system. Drums with rotating mirrors, ultrasound waves through a parafine-filled quartz tube. Capable of projecting an image up to three meters across. Displaying the same 405-line system.
http://www.modulatedlight.org/Modulated_Light_DX/UltrasoundMod.html
So how to prevent men stampeding in the theater to get a look behind the actress in the shower ?
What hologram?
Maybe I don't get it? Or maybe this is still a works in progress.
But I don't see anything about a hologram here.
The guy just used the Kinect to "record" the outlines of "fake" Princess Leia, and displayed that on his laptop screen. It was still a 2-dimensional image on the laptop screen.
Yeah, that was nice, that the Kinect could trace the outline of her. But, may I ask, so what? Isn't a video the same or better?
Maybe this was just the first step of capturing the 3-D outline of a human, for the actual hologram projection itself?
My understanding of a hologram, is the ability to project an image in 3-dimensional format, in the air.
Is that the missing link here?
The 1990s called and Nintendo wants their Virtual Boy back.
Princess Leia + Kinect = red hot blob changing shape in real-time
I like it.
Thanks for sharing!
A bit funny how the most impressive mechanical television of those early times (because now we have DLP...) was build on top of transmission standard already geared for electronic TV. Palace Deluxe must have been something in those times... (and the poster at the bottom ;> ) ...maybe even a bit unreal (say, how Burj Dubai supposedly looks to some - it isn't striking per se, because it doesn't feel real ... like a painted background element)
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