This thread has it right. The technology is new, and newly patented, and dirt cheap. It uses fixed hologriphic lenses on normal LCD screens, and is supposed to look VERY good.
There was an article about this in EETimes about 2 months ago (I saw it in the paper version, so unless I can address my recycle bin there is no URL available)
The only limitation now is that it halves your resolution. To get an 800 x 600 display, you would need an actual LCD resolution of 1600 x 600. (but that is an easy problem to solve). This will make for some very good games, and will meet the price point.
The original developers (the holographic artists mentioned in this thread) are poor now, but I believe are currently negiotation rights to their patent for millions of dollars. They probably do not have credit card processing information on their site because they are not particularly interested in selling to jane consumer, they are negiotiating with the big guns for the big money. They can knock out prototypes pretty cheaply now, but they are not interested in large scale production.
All this is from memory of an article I read over lunch two months ago, so take it all with a grain of salt.
I may be confused here as well, so feel free to correct me if I am wrong, but I think the previous post is confusing the media attributes with the data format.
First, the media limitations. CDRW disks have a lower reflectivity then CDR disks, therefore most older drives cannot read them, but some can. Also, I have seen some CDRW disks advertised (have not tried them) that seem to imply that they are CDRW, but have sufficient reflectivity to be read in all legacy drives.
The second issue is the format you write the data to the disk in. You can create an ISO9660 image on CDR or CDRW disks, no problem. You can create a Packet Read (via Adaptec DirectCD) on CDR or CDRW no problem. Heck, you can even create an ext2fs image on either type of disk. You just need the right software to be able to mount them and read them back. Unfortunately for Linux, there is no way to mount, read and write the Adaptec created disks right now.
Again, I may be confused (there is a lot of subtle technical issues with these things), so feel free to correct me if I get it wrong.
Slashdot Mirror
This thread has it right. The technology is new, and newly patented, and dirt cheap. It uses fixed hologriphic lenses on normal LCD screens, and is supposed to look VERY good.
There was an article about this in EETimes about 2 months ago (I saw it in the paper version, so unless I can address my recycle bin there is no URL available)
The only limitation now is that it halves your resolution. To get an 800 x 600 display, you would need an actual LCD resolution of 1600 x 600. (but that is an easy problem to solve). This will make for some very good games, and will meet the price point.
The original developers (the holographic artists mentioned in this thread) are poor now, but I believe are currently negiotation rights to their patent for millions of dollars. They probably do not have credit card processing information on their site because they are not particularly interested in selling to jane consumer, they are negiotiating with the big guns for the big money. They can knock out prototypes pretty cheaply now, but they are not interested in large scale production.
All this is from memory of an article I read over lunch two months ago, so take it all with a grain of salt.
Bill
I may be confused here as well, so feel free to correct me if I am wrong, but I think the previous post is confusing the media attributes with the data format.
First, the media limitations. CDRW disks have a lower reflectivity then CDR disks, therefore most older drives cannot read them, but some can. Also, I have seen some CDRW disks advertised (have not tried them) that seem to imply that they are CDRW, but have sufficient reflectivity to be read in all legacy drives.
The second issue is the format you write the data to the disk in. You can create an ISO9660 image on CDR or CDRW disks, no problem. You can create a Packet Read (via Adaptec DirectCD) on CDR or CDRW no problem. Heck, you can even create an ext2fs image on either type of disk. You just need the right software to be able to mount them and read them back. Unfortunately for Linux, there is no way to mount, read and write the Adaptec created disks right now.
Again, I may be confused (there is a lot of subtle technical issues with these things), so feel free to correct me if I get it wrong.