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."

Comments

Re:Soooo

[Daniel Franklin]

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.

Re:"real holography"

[2themax]

The article linked to in the article http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2011/video-holography-0124.html explains the actual holographic video generation part in more detail. They are using arrays of lasers to make fringe/interference patterns. This IS "real holography", just very low resolution and framerate.

Re:"real holography"

[sznupi]

What those people are doing is certainly "real holography" (not captured too well, the cameraman should move more)

It's just that obstacles are huge (to the point of being quite counterintuitive) - apparently, for a really good holography, you need a display with pixels smaller than a wavelength of light (coupled with memory and processing we're nowhere near yet)

But once we're there... oh boy. A display can look basically like a window. Much better than the gimmick of stereoscopy.

(some quick details)

Re:"real holography"

[SuricouRaven]

It's a computed hologram. The idea has been around for a while as a way to make a true 3D display, but held back by two missing technologies: A ridiculously high resolution screen, and a ridiculous amount of processing power to drive it. They have solved both, the latter by the use of a multi-GPU computer. Impressive. It's not practical yet, but it's a good start. Throw maybe a hundred times the processing power at it, and an even higher resolution display so you can do blue and green laser holography too, and it could produce an image indistinguishable from placeing a real object behind the screen.

Fake 3D ftw

[Twinbee]

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.

Re:Fake 3D ftw

[EdIII]

Interesting point.

How about Real 3D porn?

Like walking around a coffee table and seeing the two chicks digging on each other, and *you* get to choose the angle you want to view it at?

There's more money in that to be made then pharmaceuticals.

Re:Fake 3D ftw

[green1]

except plays and concerts and live performances usually do their best to simulate 2D in their inherently 3D environment, there's a reason the audience all sits on the same side of the performers and looks at them all from the "front" if 3D were really superior, we'd want to be sitting surrounding the performers, not all on the same side of them.

In your example of the couple kissing while one holds a knife behind their back, on a 2D movie screen we'd get just the perfect angle and timing to see both at just the right moments, on a 3D stage the actors usually do their best to replicate such by turning to intentionally show off the aspects they wish to portray, in contrast to movies the resulting motion, while necessary, often creates a somewhat "fake" feel to the acting which isn't necessary in the 2D plane of movies where the camera can take more genuine acting, and interpret it by moving the viewer instead.

Don't get me wrong, I love going to the theatre and watching real shows, there's an ambience you just can't get on a movie screen. But it's not for the 3D aspect of it. You get a better vantage point for most scenes on a properly shot and directed film than you can on any theatre stage.

Wrong Leia

[TimHunter]

Came for Slave Girl Leia. Leaving disappointed.

Re:"real holography"

[jamesh]

And even worse, I don't think that's the real Princess Leia. The accent is a dead giveaway!

Re:Soooo

[wierd_w]

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.

Re:meh

[Sparx139]

Yes, but it's a proof of concept. Keep in mind that this is using off-the-shelf hardware. If someone picks this up and starts to work with it, then it's only going to get better with time. I'd imagine the first televisions would be similarly "not any good", and then think back when telegrams were the only way to communicate with others. Give it time.

Re:"real holography"

[azalin]

Don't you dare to give George Lucas an excuse for yet another starwars re-release!