Slashdot Mirror
Samsung Patent Describes Holographic TV Technology (consumerist.com)
Patently Mobile is reporting about a new patent application filed by Samsung that lays out new holographic TV technology. Slashdot reader Rick Schumann writes via Consumerist: Holographic displays as described by Samsung would be able to make the depth the brain perceives consistent with the focus of the eyes. Lasers would be used to project holograms that float in front of the screen, which of course sounds a heck of a lot like a mini Princess Leia telling Obi-Wan Kenobi he's her only hope. The display apparatus could also include an eye tracking unit that would locate an observer's pupils and adjust how far it has to project the holographic image for optimum viewing.
Worth noting: This is just a patent application; no indication of even a working prototype.
Why not just get a date .... oh, sorry, I forgot, this is Slashdot!
Time for bed, said Zebedee - boing
...for viewing the towering inferno: it is a Samsung product, after all.
In this context, you can be sure there is more. The patent laws of the US and other countries require that the application (and consequently, any issued patent) describe the invention in sufficient detail so that someone of ordinary skill in the art area to which the invention most nearly pertains can make and use the invention. You don't have to build one, but you do have to provide enough detail so that someone else could build one.
Laws affecting technology will always be bad until enough techies become lawyers.
means it is only for one person, or a few. This is not the holodeck you are looking for.
Like samsung phones, washing machines....
Crooked Leia, storing classified information in a private server... did you know that she's still under investigation by the empire for doing so?
It's times like this I wish I had a friend named 'The Professor'.
the flames are so real I can feel them.
UltraHaptics:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haptic_technology#Ultrahaptics
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2QkbVr4J7CM
http://www.ultrahaptics.com/
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
With the burning enthusiasm of ardent supporters it will sure become, like some Samsung products, an explosive success.
Why not just get a date .... oh, sorry, I forgot, this is Slashdot!
And you might go to jail if you touch real boobies!
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Sounds interesting but unless the price point was the same as a regular HDTV or close, I'm not going to feel any need to spend the extra on one. I don't really see much point in 2K or 4K or 3D sets. I'm sure they're great, and if they're the same price as a regular HD set (or just a little more) I might spring for it, but if they're $100+ more than an HD set- meh. I'm fine with slightly older TV technology thanks!
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
You just need to switch to Hard Light holograms. Worked for Rimmer.
This is boring technology, even the lady in the patent isn't impressed with it!
Anyway, what the "Eye Tracking Unit" indicates is that this isn't actually a hologram but rather more tomfoolery of giving your eyes two different images. The problem with this is it won't look 3D when more than one person is looking at it.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Yeah! I prefer when they try appeal to small audiences or use more offensive words. Damn journalists using non-offensive but casual language.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
A system of this type has already been built by the German development company Seereal. Fraunhofer developed special anti-reflection coatings that allowed the construction of laser beam expansion systems for that display. Their system also used eye tracking.
I haven't seen the patent claims, but from what I see in the article I can't say that there's anything novel there. The article is absolutely terrible as a report on a patent, with it being obvious that the author knows nothing about what he writes, either about patents or technology. For example, there is no mention of the patent claims, no mention of similar technology and an unsupported claim that the device is revolutionary.
I've actually seen these devices in action a decade ago (at Darpa Tech) and it's stunning. but I never understood how they worked. Yes I understand the hologram part of this. The two things I don't understand are
1) I would think that the pitch of the spatial light modulator elements has to be much finer than the wavelength of light. Yet the surface on which these operate are enormous which would mean length/pitch would be an insane number of controllable pixels.
2) The ones I saw were black and white. Not black and green or black and red. So how are they getting the "white" part if this. lasers are monochormatic. There are white light holograms but if I recall correctly these usually give up one axis of holographic dispersion to make the other axis multi-color. and even then they usually are haloed with fringing rainbows (like the Visa card Dove).
So how do they pull off these two tricks?
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
If a system uses eye tracking to decide how to display something, doesn't that mean it's necessarily limited to a single user experience?
I've seen this idea proposed at least since the mid 1980's. The problem is the so-called "spatial light modulator" which doesn't exist beyond something a few millimetres on a side capable of not much more than making a fuzzy dot, and that only in the monochromatic light of the laser. The problems, to be practical, are being able to produce a plane larger than the area to be viewed that can change the phase of the source light precisely (with fractional wavelength accuracy) in real time at a density of greater than 25,000 pixels per linear inch and the bandwidth and computing horsepower to run it. No one has shown a way it can be done with today's technology for arbitrary images even though there has been much interesting work put into it over the decades. It's still out of reach for now. There is a way to address the issues and we can produce full colour displays that have both horizontal and vertical parallax as well as addressing the focus issue. Gabriel Lippmann, who won the Nobel prize in Physics in 1908 for his invention of a method of true spectral colour photography that were actually true full colour holograms which he produced a half a century before Dennis Gabor's work, also proposed a method of 3D imaging which became known as Integral Photography. Using an array of tiny lenses (NOT prisms as in lenticular displays) one can reconstruct wavefronts using a subtractive approach (subtracting phase components from discrete samples of white diffuse light) instead of the additive one used in modern holography. Numerous examples of varying quality exist going back many decades. Although impractical at the time, today it can be done. Back in the mid 1980's I received a patent (US patent 4,878,735) on using diffractive elements for the lens array and have a description of the technology in terms of it being an optical computing architecture (which I called "Integral MicroOptics") at http://www.eastjesus.net/tech/... (with some pictures if you are interested). Interestingly, the Patent office introduced a typo in the title of the patent calling "zone plates" "tone plates" and that has never been fixed! (Being a musician, I've always gotten a laugh out of that!)
The difficult part of making a holographic display is the "transmissive light spatial modulator", as its referred to in the patent application. Since the patent tries to cover any conceivable device that would have this functionality, it is unlikely that they know how to make one themselves. Most of the main "innovations" are things which I realized after a couple of days thought on the subject (with just an undergraduate physics degree and no professional experience), so I can only imagine that they are so obvious to an actual expert in the field that they are not even worth mentioning.
The descriptions of the patent all seem to just describe a standard holographic display (look on wikipedia). You have a light source, a screen that either affects the amplitude or phase of the light, and then some lenses to properly display that light.
It was my understanding that the hard part has always been doing the light calculations in real time. Going from a 3D description of a scene to the wavefront passing through the screen isn't trivial.
If you liked this thought maybe you would find my blog nice too: