Slashdot Mirror
Elon Musk's New Hologram Project Invites 'Iron Man' Comparisons
Nerval's Lobster writes "In the 'Iron Man' trilogy, billionaire inventor Tony Stark uses a gesture-controlled hologram to draft new designs of the titular armor, sending virtual parts flying around his lab with the flick of a wrist. Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk—who is often compared to Stark by the tech press—is apparently creating the real-life equivalent of that fictional hologram system. 'We figured out how to design rocket parts just w hand movements through the air (seriously),' he Tweeted August 23. 'Now need a high frame rate holograph generator.' In a follow-up Tweet, he added: 'Will post video next week of designing a rocket part with hand gestures & then immediately printing it in titanium.' But Musk has no plans to actually make an Iron Man-inspired suit of armor. 'I am not going to make an IM suit,' he wrote on Twitter, 'however design by hand-manipulated hologram is actually useful.'"
Seriously, every other news outlet has already gotten this wrong, but I expected better from Slashdot. A hologram is an application of phased array optics. You have a 2D surface. That surface contains a series of seemingly arbitrary fields of light and dark. Those fields, when illuminated with a coherent light source (like a LASER), produce an interference pattern which reproduces the light field emanating from a 3D object as it passes through that 2D surface. In essence, it creates a window through which you can view true 3D. That shit in Iron Man, with images floating in air... that's not a hologram.