No, your understanding of holography is correct. Your confusion arises from my own careless use of language -- my bad, my apologies.
I fell into the habit of calling the display holographic because it requires the same core skill set to create the master plate as a hologram, it uses the same materials, it presents (as you said) the appearance for a single static viewer of being a hologram, and, most critically, it saved me half an hour of in-one-ear-and-out-the-other explanations to various VCs etc of the staggering difference between this display and its competitors, in terms of both image quality and commercialisability.
By simply using the word "Holographic", I could immediately fully communicate the key point, viz. that this display was fundamentally different and superior to its competition, due to using Holographic techniques rather than physical.
On a similar note, rather than bleat for ages about market estimates and growth projections etc., I could achieve a fuller understanding in my audience of the potential market by simply saying
"If
you were about to buy a new computer monitor, and you could buy an ordinary LCD for $500, or a 3D one for $520, what would you do?"
Just by the bye, you mention "huge increase in computer power"/"reproducing this amount of information is impossible" etc. Actually, that's pretty much what the game engines of
Quake/UT/et al already do. They store and calculate the entire 3D world. Come display-time, they identify the various viewers' viewing points, and draw the images for them. But yeah, i guess there's a difference between that and automatically generating a couple of million potential image-angles each time.
The display is holographic to the same degree as your mobile phone and your Palm Pilot is holographic. They all use static/passive refractive layers to modify how the image is presented. These layers' materials are physically the same materials as are used to record holograms, but in this case no image is embedded in them. In the case of this display, a single refractive layer bends light alternately for each image. So it's using holographic materials rather than a physical optical layer of prisms or wires etc. And it is this that gives it its fundamental image and image characteristics superiority over the clumsy physical light manipulators. I'm being very careful of my NDA here, but all this information and more is in the patent descriptions which are publicly filed and accessible. If you look at the low-level structure of an LCD panel and the file-format of a TV broadcast, the penny should drop pretty quickly.
Alas, 3D TV, although the holy grail, is a whole 'nother kettle of fish. You want to have all your family/friends parked in the living room watching the 3D, so you need to have multi-viewer capability. Multi-viewer 3D is very easy for the software to deliver but rather more difficult for the hardware to deliver.
Unless you force viewers to sit themselves in particular "sweet spots", the display must have head-tracking capabilities, must be constantly scanning the room to identify where people are, and then building and presenting images for/to their locations.
You are therefore completely at the mercy of the headtracking system, assuming your display design is even capable of throwing multiple images, which many aren't. And these systems do have problems with unusually shaped people, eg dark rings under eyes, sunglasses, etc.
I believe there ARE usa tv channels broadcasting in 3D. Presumably this is for the mad-keen out there with their LCD shutter glasses, or those who watch tv alone.
3D imaging systems are extremely old, many actually go back to Victorian times!
I have no idea what the mylar film one is doing, I'd have to see the article. But the other one is just a flavour of the volumetric approach, same as Hitachi's. There are a number of such rotating-mirror systems floating around still. The issue preventing their spread is Commercialisation: they are very fragile and prone to being knocked out of alignment, and the 3D image just isn't real good. Add to that the high cost of manufacture plus non-standard software and hardware to connect to a PC, and you're pretty much on a non-starter.
But yeah, once you dig around in this field you realise there's nothing new under the sun.
I have the same eye pattern when I'm not wearing glasses/contacts.
I'd be very surprised if you've lost depth perception. In fact, for high-speed or close-tolerance activities, a single eye is superior to two for purposes of precisely judging location. This is because it's less "noisy" for the brain to identify what's happening to the objects' locations. For example, if you're doing any high-speed thread-the-needle manoevres in a car, close one eye to improve your understanding of the physical layout that's about to become so very important.
The brain normally uses BOTH dynamic parallax (what happens to the image when the eye/head moves?) and static parallax (what happens to the image when looked at from the left eye vs the right eye, and also, what angle are the eyes physically pointing at?)
With a single eye, the brain can create 3D images by comparing how the image changes as the eye (head) moves. The parallax between the two images allows a precise fix on the shape and location of the object observed. Most spiders use parallax to build up a 3D view of the world, for example, in case you've ever wondered why they bounce/vibrate in the final inches as they creep up on their prey.
Using only one eye DOES mean you can't create a static 3D image, you must move. This means you won't be able to take advantage of autostereoscopic displays, Im afraid, as they serve up predigested images catering to the expected angles to the eyes (the "frustum" IIRC).
To use a 3D display, you can either use one of the volumetric displays such as the Hitachi one, or use glasses/contact lenses to level the power of both eyes.
I was CEO of a 3D display startup before they did the dirty on me, so I can offer some insight here.
This Hitachi display is not new technology and it has some problems, principally:
size, bulk, cost, noise
image can not be opaque (only translucent)
image is blurred towards its centre by internal "cloud" or "haze" effect created by the axis of the spinning plate
unusual/custom software and camera setups required to create image
On the upside:
no special viewing position required, you can walk around it
works for people with only one eye
It would be most useful for applications such as air traffic control, etc.
It competes with the other autostereoscopic displays (the LCD shutter glasses will never break out of their nerd/medical/scientific-imaging market for social and multi-tasking reasons), of which there are only really 2 consumer-market viable architectures:
parallax barrier
holographic
The other displays linked to in the comments, and various others not linked, are all variations on the parallax barrier approach. Again, not new. They have the benefits of:
being relatively cheap
having more or less the same physical form factor as a normal flat-screen
only needing special graphics drivers to display normal 3D images, which are pre-written for most current graphics cards
They have the big downsides of:
requiring very close manufacturing tolerances
picket fence effect where black vertical bars appear to float in mid air between you and the image
inversion -- where moving left or right "flips" an image inside out, eg a nose will go backwards while ears come forwards, EXTREMELY disconcerting
very very narrow viewing angle and position -- move an inch in any direction from the sweet spot, e.g. lean back in your chair, and the image goes to pieces
The limited viewing angle practically requires most parallax barrier systems to use active head tracking systems, where the display identifies where your eyes are and retargets the imaging accordingly. This exposes the practical usefulness of the 3D image to a further potential degradation if the headtracking system is not spot on.
Sharp and Dresden both use parallax barrier. Dresden's is beautifully bright but its headtracking can unfortunately jump the image around very badly for some people -- speaking from experience, it is beyond unusable if you're one of the unlucky ones, the image is jumping inches in random directions on random sub-second intervals.
Another major disadvantage is the extreme difficulty of presenting a 2D image via parallax barrier systems, thereby sharply restricting its desktop market. If you want to write or read something, such as a spreadsheet or some code or a word document, you're out of luck -- you need another monitor.
The other approach has been developed by a single company comprising now 2 people (holographic artists) about 10-12 years ago. The Display:
is holographic
is at the theoretical maximum of all the optical angles etc.
has no picket fence effect, no inversion, and no intrinsic refresh rate (ie, instantaneous)
provides very large 3D image-depth of about one screen-width "height" towards you and 1.5 screen-widths "depth" away from you
degrades gracefullly to 2D should you lean too far away from the very broad sweet spot, so needs no head tracking
is about the same size as a normal flat panel screen, although deeper to allow for non-flat backlight
has no brightness issues as there is only a single additional layer to the LCD
astoundingly, it is extraordinarily cheap and simple to build using existing technology and manufacturing processes
requires NO special cameras or preprocessing required-- all standard. to create a 3D video-conferencing camera, just tape together two narrow cameras so the lenses are eye-width apart, interlace
Slashdot Mirror
someone else asked the same question regarding my technology overview. the answer is here: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=98159&cid=8391 586/
I fell into the habit of calling the display holographic because it requires the same core skill set to create the master plate as a hologram, it uses the same materials, it presents (as you said) the appearance for a single static viewer of being a hologram, and, most critically, it saved me half an hour of in-one-ear-and-out-the-other explanations to various VCs etc of the staggering difference between this display and its competitors, in terms of both image quality and commercialisability.
By simply using the word "Holographic", I could immediately fully communicate the key point, viz. that this display was fundamentally different and superior to its competition, due to using Holographic techniques rather than physical.
On a similar note, rather than bleat for ages about market estimates and growth projections etc., I could achieve a fuller understanding in my audience of the potential market by simply saying
Just by the bye, you mention "huge increase in computer power"/"reproducing this amount of information is impossible" etc. Actually, that's pretty much what the game engines of Quake/UT/et al already do. They store and calculate the entire 3D world. Come display-time, they identify the various viewers' viewing points, and draw the images for them. But yeah, i guess there's a difference between that and automatically generating a couple of million potential image-angles each time.
The display is holographic to the same degree as your mobile phone and your Palm Pilot is holographic. They all use static/passive refractive layers to modify how the image is presented. These layers' materials are physically the same materials as are used to record holograms, but in this case no image is embedded in them. In the case of this display, a single refractive layer bends light alternately for each image. So it's using holographic materials rather than a physical optical layer of prisms or wires etc. And it is this that gives it its fundamental image and image characteristics superiority over the clumsy physical light manipulators. I'm being very careful of my NDA here, but all this information and more is in the patent descriptions which are publicly filed and accessible. If you look at the low-level structure of an LCD panel and the file-format of a TV broadcast, the penny should drop pretty quickly.
cheers
Sal
--
Sal
Writings: saltation.blogspot.com
Wravings: go-blog-go.blogspot.com
Alas, 3D TV, although the holy grail, is a whole 'nother kettle of fish. You want to have all your family/friends parked in the living room watching the 3D, so you need to have multi-viewer capability. Multi-viewer 3D is very easy for the software to deliver but rather more difficult for the hardware to deliver.
Unless you force viewers to sit themselves in particular "sweet spots", the display must have head-tracking capabilities, must be constantly scanning the room to identify where people are, and then building and presenting images for/to their locations.
You are therefore completely at the mercy of the headtracking system, assuming your display design is even capable of throwing multiple images, which many aren't. And these systems do have problems with unusually shaped people, eg dark rings under eyes, sunglasses, etc.
I believe there ARE usa tv channels broadcasting in 3D. Presumably this is for the mad-keen out there with their LCD shutter glasses, or those who watch tv alone.
Sal
--
Sal
Writings: saltation.blogspot.com
Wravings: go-blog-go.blogspot.com
3D imaging systems are extremely old, many actually go back to Victorian times!
I have no idea what the mylar film one is doing, I'd have to see the article. But the other one is just a flavour of the volumetric approach, same as Hitachi's. There are a number of such rotating-mirror systems floating around still. The issue preventing their spread is Commercialisation: they are very fragile and prone to being knocked out of alignment, and the 3D image just isn't real good. Add to that the high cost of manufacture plus non-standard software and hardware to connect to a PC, and you're pretty much on a non-starter.
But yeah, once you dig around in this field you realise there's nothing new under the sun.
cheers
Sal
--
Sal
Writings: saltation.blogspot.com
Wravings: go-blog-go.blogspot.com
I have the same eye pattern when I'm not wearing glasses/contacts.
I'd be very surprised if you've lost depth perception. In fact, for high-speed or close-tolerance activities, a single eye is superior to two for purposes of precisely judging location. This is because it's less "noisy" for the brain to identify what's happening to the objects' locations. For example, if you're doing any high-speed thread-the-needle manoevres in a car, close one eye to improve your understanding of the physical layout that's about to become so very important.
The brain normally uses BOTH dynamic parallax (what happens to the image when the eye/head moves?) and static parallax (what happens to the image when looked at from the left eye vs the right eye, and also, what angle are the eyes physically pointing at?)
With a single eye, the brain can create 3D images by comparing how the image changes as the eye (head) moves. The parallax between the two images allows a precise fix on the shape and location of the object observed. Most spiders use parallax to build up a 3D view of the world, for example, in case you've ever wondered why they bounce/vibrate in the final inches as they creep up on their prey.
Using only one eye DOES mean you can't create a static 3D image, you must move. This means you won't be able to take advantage of autostereoscopic displays, Im afraid, as they serve up predigested images catering to the expected angles to the eyes (the "frustum" IIRC).
To use a 3D display, you can either use one of the volumetric displays such as the Hitachi one, or use glasses/contact lenses to level the power of both eyes.
cheers
Sal
--
Sal
Writings: saltation.blogspot.com
Wravings: go-blog-go.blogspot.com
No, DTI's display is a parallax barrier design.
:)
Note the physical layout in http://www.dti3d.com/technology.asp/
Also, you'll note their website and business approach is quite professional
--
Sal
Writings: saltation.blogspot.com
Wravings: go-blog-go.blogspot.com
This Hitachi display is not new technology and it has some problems, principally:
On the upside:
It would be most useful for applications such as air traffic control, etc.
It competes with the other autostereoscopic displays (the LCD shutter glasses will never break out of their nerd/medical/scientific-imaging market for social and multi-tasking reasons), of which there are only really 2 consumer-market viable architectures:
The other displays linked to in the comments, and various others not linked, are all variations on the parallax barrier approach. Again, not new. They have the benefits of:
They have the big downsides of:
The limited viewing angle practically requires most parallax barrier systems to use active head tracking systems, where the display identifies where your eyes are and retargets the imaging accordingly. This exposes the practical usefulness of the 3D image to a further potential degradation if the headtracking system is not spot on.
Sharp and Dresden both use parallax barrier. Dresden's is beautifully bright but its headtracking can unfortunately jump the image around very badly for some people -- speaking from experience, it is beyond unusable if you're one of the unlucky ones, the image is jumping inches in random directions on random sub-second intervals.
Another major disadvantage is the extreme difficulty of presenting a 2D image via parallax barrier systems, thereby sharply restricting its desktop market. If you want to write or read something, such as a spreadsheet or some code or a word document, you're out of luck -- you need another monitor.
The other approach has been developed by a single company comprising now 2 people (holographic artists) about 10-12 years ago. The Display: