Holograms leave the Sci-Fi world to meet reality...

Dave · Post by **Dave** » 2005-04-13 08:17am

Dude! SW and ST fans; The Hologram is now real life! Opticality Corporation has developed the modern 3-D hologram. This company from East Germany has used software and a special filter to turn a flat panel display into a moving real-time hologram viewable with the naked eye. They even have working models. Monitor sizes range from 17" to 50". Go to www.opticalitycorporation.com to find out more!

Shroom Man 777 · Post by **Shroom Man 777** » 2005-04-13 09:26am

It's not a hologram, it's just a 3d screen that doesn't need the viewer to wear those funky glasses.

Interestingly, a few days ago I was wondering why those 3d theatres required glasses. I know those movie screens display distorted image to be reprocessed by the glasses into another distorted image which our eyes can process into 3d images, but why do we need the glasses? Can't the screen just show the twice-distorted image (I mean, the resulting image that passes through the 3d sunglasses, the reprocessed image)?

I wonder if this 3d TV did what I just said or used another method of generating a 3d image.

Ace Pace · Post by **Ace Pace** » 2005-04-13 09:35am

I remember reading this on Xbit, its not holograms, its 3D screens.

That NOS Guy · Post by **That NOS Guy** » 2005-04-13 09:50am

Ace Pace wrote:I remember reading this on Xbit, its not holograms, its 3D screens.

Still pretty cool none the less.

Ace Pace · Post by **Ace Pace** » 2005-04-13 09:51am

That NOS Guy wrote:
Ace Pace wrote:I remember reading this on Xbit, its not holograms, its 3D screens.
Still pretty cool none the less.

Yes, now if any games would I don't know... support this, would make me actully want to buy it.

Now its just a gimmick.

The Dark · Post by **The Dark** » 2005-04-13 10:07am

Shroom Man 777 wrote:It's not a hologram, it's just a 3d screen that doesn't need the viewer to wear those funky glasses.

Interestingly, a few days ago I was wondering why those 3d theatres required glasses. I know those movie screens display distorted image to be reprocessed by the glasses into another distorted image which our eyes can process into 3d images, but why do we need the glasses? Can't the screen just show the twice-distorted image (I mean, the resulting image that passes through the 3d sunglasses, the reprocessed image)?

It depends on the form of 3D. The old ones used two images drawn with blue and red lines. One lens filtered out the blue, the other filtered out red. By slightly offsetting the two sets of lines, it appeared to be three-dimensional. Newer ones, IIRC, use polarized lenses that have the polarization perpindicular to each other. This somehow makes it appear 3D. I don't understand anything beyond the layman's explanations, though.
The glasses are needed because the viewers sit at different distances and angles to the screen. I think the twice-altered image would work if everyone sat the same distance and angle from the screen. The glasses provide a set distance for focusing, and the angle apparently isn't that big a deal, although I always noticed that the image "wavered" slightly in my vision.

Lord Zentei · Post by **Lord Zentei** » 2005-04-13 11:46am

One of the key differences between true holograms and regular 3-d displays is the presence of parralax in holograms; if you are looking at a hologram and move your head sideways, you will see things behind the object in the image, as though looking through a window. Break the hologram and the entire image along with the parallax effect remains in each piece, only the windows are smaller. You can have a "moving picture" in holograms by taking multiple holograms on the same photographic plate, but then you loose the parallax effect along one axis.

Tommy J · Post by **Tommy J** » 2005-04-13 11:55am

3D television

Out of this world

Nov 11th 2004
From The Economist print edition

Researchers can now broadcast moving holograms

IT IS not merely tractor beams that have a counterpart in the real world (see article). Some recent work by NASA, America's space agency, has produced and broadcast a prototype moving hologram.

SHIVA, the Spaceflight Holography Investigation in a Virtual Apparatus, was conceived in 1999 as an aid to conducting research in space. The “microgravity” environment found in orbit around the Earth has many advantages for scientists who want a greater understanding of physics, chemistry and biology. Unfortunately, excellent living conditions, safety and a regular home life are not among them. The answer is unmanned missions. But experiments on these still need to be controlled and observed, which is hard when the researchers cannot see what is going on.

SHIVA is designed to overcome this by broadcasting moving 3D images—in essence, 3D TV. And James Trolinger, of MetroLaser, a firm based in Irvine, California, has recently demonstrated its viability by using it to conduct, by remote control, a previously unperformed experiment.

Holograms are interference patterns generated by the interaction of a blank reference laser beam with a second beam that has been reflected from an object of interest. If a beam similar to the original reference beam is shone through a hologram, the result is a three-dimensional image of the object scanned.

In principle, making a moving hologram is easy. Just as a moving picture is actually a series of stills shown in quick succession, so a moving hologram would be a series of still holograms. The problem is that individual still holograms contain so much information that they are usually captured on film (indeed, so much information is needed that the film in question has a grain size a tenth to a hundredth that of standard photographic film). The electronic cameras used in television cannot provide anything like this level of resolution, so 3D TV has not been thought a viable proposition.

However, according to Dr Trolinger, electronic holography for scientific purposes need not suffer from that limitation. Instead of trying to grab each frame in a single exposure, the scientist (unlike the entertainer) can wait as the data build up over time. That is the wrinkle which allows SHIVA to work.

The test that Dr Trolinger and his colleagues conducted used SHIVA to look for a phenomenon in fluid dynamics called “history drag”. The details do not matter, except to say that this is precisely the sort of experiment that might be carried out in space, in order to eliminate the distorting effects of gravity. Despite being predicted as long ago as 1887, history drag had not before been observed. But Dr Trolinger observed it—and did so remotely with a ground-based version of SHIVA. The holodeck it isn't. But Dr Trolinger has made his point. It should be possible to observe and control such experiments in space. And if digital video cameras improve enough, 3D TV might yet become a reality.

Nick Lancaster · Post by **Nick Lancaster** » 2005-04-13 03:30pm

Key word: 'special filters'.

That's usually a sign that there's some kind of technowankery going on.

Key word: 'visible to the naked eye'

More technowankery. Naked eye generally means without special lenses or ... special filters.

Key word: 'flat panel display'

If it's on a flat panel display, it ain't truly 3-D, is it? Nor is it necessarily a hologram.