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A 3D Display You Can Touch
mikejuk writes "Are we getting closer to really effective volumetric 3D display technology? A new display, designed in Russia, uses cold fog and a laser projector to create a volumetric 3D image that you can touch. A tracking device (no, it's not a Kinect) is used to detect the user's hand and moves the virtual objects in response. There have been cold fog 3D displays before, but this one has a reasonable resolution and looks near to being a finished product that could be on sale soon. Estimated price? Between $4000 and $30,000."
At last: a realistic estimate!
http://michaelsmith.id.au
That's a funny definition of "Touch" - yes it responds to your finger, but there isn't anything physical there to push against, so it's no more a touch interface than Kinect is.
Help me! I'm turning into a grapefruit!
I can imagine the new porn that will come out... literally!
"Touch me, Obi-Wan Kenobi. You're my only bloke."
What advantage does this offer that could justify the upper bound on pricing? Is there anything that could justify a 4K price? or is this just a novel idea thing?
$4k vs. $30k probably depends whether they lovingly hand-craft 10 units or get a sweatshop to knock them out in quantity.
$4k would be low enough for some gadget freaks (i.e. the ones with $5k hi-fis and $10k tellys) with more money than sense to buy them for fun.
$30k might be low enough for research teams with an end-of-year surplus to get one in order to investigate your first question.
I'm sure that they'll want one on CSI but they're fictitious so its probably cheaper and more convincing to mock one up with CGI in post-production.
Super-villains will want the 20' x 20' de-luxe model to explain their world domination plans in terms that even an over-sexed British spy or Austrian ex-bodybuilder can understand - that will cost more than $30k but (a) Super-villains never pay, they just murder the creator and (b) see 'CSI' above.
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
It's just another piece of vaporware!
Bad slashdot reporting as usual.
The big deal here is the "mid-air" aspect, i.e. no actual surface.
However the display is 2D and the article makes no claim for it being 3D. It's not volumetric, it's not 3D. It's a projector.
It's very cool, and Slashdot has just completely misrepresented it. Well done.
While the video looks impressive at first, since this is an unusual way of displaying video and tracking user input, I didn't see them doing anything that you couldn't do with a touchscreen.
The video shows a lot of sliding and manipulating images (rotating, zooming, pinching, etc) but I noticed that they were only controlling the X and Y axes. I kept hoping that they would rotate something in the Z axis or perhaps place a 3D object behind another, but it was just one of the typical "sort through a bunch of photos" demos that we've seen many times before.
I know that this isn't the final version, but I don't see how something like this would be useful until it can actually track and utilize that third dimension. Right now it looks flashy and may lead to a true 3D display, but this seems to be a 2D screen suspended in mist with motion tracking. It certainly isn't going to be portable like a tablet, and the wavering display isn't going to be as good as a proper screen. The 200ms of input lag is rather unimpressive as well.
I would absolutely love to have a good 3D display with true 3D motion tracking, even if it led to me having gorilla arms. We've come a long way, but we've still got a long way to go as well.
This is entirely 2D, not 3D.
The eu.techcrunch.com article makes no mention of 3D. It's the i-programmer.info dopes that mislabeled this as 3D. The slashdot submitter and editor also get blame for perpetuating the error.
The technology uses a base unit that blows a basically 2D "sheet" of fog upwards as a display surface. Behind that there is a 2D laser projector aimed at the fog display screen.
Some people mentioned the keyboard in the demo as 3D, but no, that was the same as any ordinary 2D windowing system. The 2D keyboard that came up merely replaced the 2D content that was supposedly 'behind' it.
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