One Step Closer to Star Wars Holograms 122
An anonymous reader noted a USC research project that is coming ever closer to bringing the classic Star Wars communication holograms from Tatooine to Earth. There's nifty video and some high resolution pictures of Tie Fighters projected into 3-D. Still no clear way to project it from an astro mech droid, but I'm sure that's coming.
Re:Wow. Just... WOW! (Score:3, Insightful)
Not new, but nevertheless cool (Score:3, Insightful)
They have done some cool things to achieve the effect. Key problems to overcome were:
1. The mirror isn't. A regular rotating mirror would allow viewing from a narrow range of heights. The mirror they use is diffuse in the vertical direction, while acting like a regular mirror in horizontal direction.
2. How to get a fscking fast projector: they use a regular DVI stream, but encode multiple one-bit images into the components. That way a 16-bit-per-pixel stream gets you 16 binary frames per each DVI frame. With 200Hz refresh rate, that is 3200 monochrome frames per second. To decode the stream, they use a custom FPGA-based decoder between the DVI input and the DLP chip.
3. How to render the source material so that it looks good -- and do it in real time, too. They overcome various sources of distortion,
All in all, methinks this is worthy of re-publishing, even if it's stale. Very cool technology.
Re:Wow. Just... WOW! (Score:4, Insightful)
Since you clearly want that thing in an enclosed box (I prefer my TVs to be of the less then lethal variety) It would seem to make sense to make that box a vacuum or at least low pressure, they were making some pretty massive CRTs right at the end of that tech so I imagine that this wouldn't be a problem. Ultimately thought I think that this just isn't practical and probably never will be, it doesn't scale very well, 60 fps would likely shatter the mirror, in most applications nobody would actually care to sit at the back and frankly it's a big spinning mirror in the middle of your office or living room.
Re:Wow. Just... WOW! (Score:3, Insightful)
But you can put it in a solid glass cylinder and spin it, you get more mass to spin but next to no air resistance and shattering would not be very likely
Re:Wow. Just... WOW! (Score:1, Insightful)
I don't think I would want 40" of glass spinning at 20Hz in my living room. Shrapnel.
That's what a bunch of engineers at RCA thought, when they pushed for an all-electronics solution, without mechanical stuff.
shhhh you use something every day that does 2000-9000hz per second... your car engine (we just call it RPM there). Or even 20-200hz a fan on your computer or in your house to cool things off.
Also making something reflective does not have to be a glass mirror. Mylar plastic, polished metal, even the junk they put on CDs...
Now where it breaks down is what they were 'faking' which was the camera the were filming tied back into the computer displaying the images. So that way it could tell what angle you were looking from in the vertical axis. It would distort it in the proper way so the 1 person looking at it thru the camera and it would look correct. Notice how 'small' they made it? That is because it would probably start to warp and distort at a much bigger size.
That is one of the reasons it failed. As depending on how you look at it things can get distorted. So you can get the effect to work for 1 person it does not work with 2 or more.
Also to your point spinning parts = returned units = higher cost to manufacture and fix. Also I bet the noise of a flat mirror surface spinning at 30-60hz is quite incredible to hear. Much like a fan....