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Technology

The Plotter Thickens With Volumetric 3-D Display 138

Posted by timothy from the that's-not-a-holodeck-mate dept.
Gregg Favalora writes: "I wrote back in October indicating that my firm, Actuality Systems, was working on what we considered to be one of the highest-resolution volumetric 3-D displays ever made. What's cool about it is that it sports over 100 million voxels, color, and an embedded graphics processing architecture with 6 gigabits of RAM. And it'll work off SCSI with many existing applications. Anyhow, the news is that it has started working."

"We are still tweaking the optics and finishing the real-time interface, but photos of the display are now at our website. This is taking place in a startup lab environment, so it's not in a pretty package yet. Rather, it's a work in progress, and we hope to be giving public demos in several months." It may still be vapor, but you can almost see Leia appealing to old Ben Kenobi inside that little plastic dome. Howsabout a test sample, Gregg, so we know it's real?
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The Plotter Thickens With Volumetric 3-D Display More

The Plotter Thickens With Volumetric 3-D Display

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  • I'd like a 600rpm rotating camera in my chest to get a picture of my heart. On second thought, a stethoscope would do just fine.

  • Other Systems (Score:3)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 27, 2001 @10:00PM (#335415)
    Ford/DERA is working on a 3D monitor that works using MEMS mirrors. Light is projected onto the mirrors, and focused by them onto a point in space so that the image really floats in front of the viewer.
    http://www.dera.gov.uk/html/news/forddera_index. ht m

    DTI has a 3d monitor, currently available, that uses a lenticular lense placed in front of an LCD monitor. The lens separates the LCD into left and right eye views. The brain puts these together and makes it look like images are floating in front of the monitor.
    http://www.dti3d.com

  • "6 gigabits of RAM"? Come on.. (Score:4)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 27, 2001 @09:45PM (#335416)


    What is this "gigabits of RAM" crap? Do I go to the store to buy a nanohogshead of milk? Perhaps a septapeck or octoliter of beer?

    One megabit is 128KB to the rest of us with a clue. One "gigabit" would presumably be 1024 times this figure. 128MB of RAM in a gigabit. 6 gigabits in this display would then be 6*128MB RAM. 768MB of ram, or what typically ships in a low-end server these days.

    Next.

  • Does this make anyone else think of The Secret of NIMH?
  • Have you guys never seen the movie? Nicodemus uses a mirror that spins up to ultra high rpm's to show Mrs. Brisby what happened to her husband.
  • One fun fact I noticed is that the web server is allowing directory listings, and that the images/ directory has lots of other images of the people at the company, etc...

    http://www.actuality-systems.com/images/ [actuality-systems.com]

  • Too bad the fortune tellers can't afford it yet.

    --
    WolfSkunks for a better Linux Kernel
    $Stalag99{"URL"}="http://stalag99.keenspace.com";
  • Scalpels made of obsidian?

    The real world is way ahead of you. :) Ceramic [finescience.com] scalpels are already in use.

  • It'd be at least as exciting as the Corn Cam [iowafarmer.com] :-)
  • 3D porn? Isn't that kind of like, umm, real sex?
  • Now you too can pay a few thou for a volumetric display, and show a three dimensional, virtual picture of a three dimensional, real, two dollar pot plant.

    Way to save money, dudes.
    --
  • Like I said, this is a plug. I don't care. It's a cool product (well, possible future product) that I hadn't heard about anywhere else, and I was sufficiently interested to go have a look at the website. I was impressed.

    Anyway, VA's stock price is one-squillionth of the ridiculous peaks. Big deal. Do you get some kind of kick out of seeing that? WTF has VA ever done to you? They support k5 - not to mention sourceforge. Do you want *that* to fall over or something?

  • I think you've misunderstood the technology. The projector is fixed in space and the screen spins; the projected image changes with time to match the spinning of the screen and give a constant (3D-effect) image.

    To create a recording system based on this technology, you must find the logical reversal of this playback method, and a spinning camera isn't it! Hypothetically, I think you would have to have the spinning screen occupying the same space as the object being filmed, and then record the light *inside* the screen as it spun.

    I suppose you could spin a camera around the object and then use heavy computer munging to generate a signal to drive the projector, but frankly you might as well just use CG to start with... :-)

  • For a really cool demo, get a camcorder on a spinning mount to match your products, then do a time lapse of a plant germinating..... Why not just use mirror(s)?
  • I recall an experimental rig in which you viewed a screen reflected on a flexible plastic membrane stretched over the front of a large woofer. The woofer moved the surface alternately concave and convex, imparting a small, but real, range of front-to-back motion. Different images on the screen had to be synchronized with the movement of the reflecting membrane, and the persistance of vision smeared them into a composite 3d image.
  • Must a display like this only show voxel graphics, or could it (in theory) be programmed to show polygon-style graphics (as produced by your garden variety 3D gamer card) instead?
  • True, but they are still projecting the final output onto a two dimensional surface as I understand it, its just that this surface is spinning very quickly. So you are still generating 2 dimensional images, you just need to generate 360 (or however many) different 2d images per revolution. So my thought is that perhaps there is a way to form an intelligible 3D display based just on the 360 different 2d polygonal images, rather than having to (render into a voxel array first, and then render the 2d images out of that). But maybe not (except for certain simple images)
  • I think I saw it in the Atomium (in Belgium): there they had a microscope that was completly holographic (floating in the air). You could actually see a magnified sample though it! It was a static holograph (IIRC), but apart from that I found it very impressive. That is the kind of holographs I would like to see computer generated... :)
  • Keep in mind that even on an ordinary monitor, the "polygon-style display" you see is really composed of millions of little pixels. A volumetric display uses the same raster scan methodology, only in 3 dimensions, hence we get voxels instead of pixels. In terms of how the voxel display is rendered, I imagine it undergoes a process analogous to 2D rendering. The difference is that once the polygons have been transformed into camera space, instead of projecting them into 2-dimensional screen space and then rasterizing them into a 2-dimensional memory buffer, the polygons are simply rasterized into a 3-dimensional memory buffer which is used to drive the volumetric display's refresh.
  • Ah, yes, I was waiting for someone to make the connection. :)

    IMO, that's actually the way to go. We're getting closer all the time to understanding the visual cortex, and it seems a dreadful waste of resources to use a brute-force mechanical display solution when you could simply render an entire scene directly into someone's field of vision by talking to his optic nerve.

    Unfortunately, the technology to do that safely and cheaply is probably 70-100 years distant, and there will always be people who don't feel comfortable with it, are allergic to whatever implants they develop, etc.

    Unless someone figures out a noninvasive method for doing it, like in Gibson's short, there will probably always be a market for volumetric displays, just as there will always be a market for 2D displays. The two types of display are as fundamentally different as pencils and calligraphy pens.
  • An interesting idea. In fact, one might propose that we simply create a hemispherically-shaped LCD display with the pixels on the outside, and then use it to display graphics with a 360 degree field of view.

    This would be a perfect application of lumigraph technology. A lumigraph is a departure from traditional 3D rendering techniques. It can be thought of as a function which perfectly encodes the light transfer characteristics of an object. Once you have computed the lumigraph function for an object (or a scene), you can say "Give me the color I will see if I'm looking at it from such-and-such vantage point, at such-and-such distance." So, refreshing our hypothetical hemispherical LCD would be as simple as evaluating the lumigraph function for the scene across its surface.

    There are a lot of mathematical and engineering problems for this approach--it's damned hard to compute those functions to begin with, and probably not feasible to express a changing scene in terms of its lumigraph function.
  • From what I understand, the display is a flat-panel LCD which spins rapidly. Assuming this is so, this display has a major limitation: it can't be viewed from overhead! As you move your head from the horizontal (head-on) aspect, the display will become increasingly distorted, until you're looking directly down at the display, at which point it won't be showing much of anything. Yech!
  • All 2-dimensional and most 3-dimensional display technologies are designed with a single user in mind, viewing the display from one vantage point. While this is fine as long as the user (or small group of users) are performing first-person tasks such as writing a paper, browsing the web, or running around killing people with a rocket launcher.

    The moment one tries to bring more than one vantage point into perspective, however, the limitations of a flat display make themselves known. Ever noticed how hard it is to achieve really good results with a 3D modelling package? Ever tried to visualize a complex relationship between dozens or hundreds of objects in 3 dimensional space? It's damned hard using today's display technology.

    While demand for these displays will be small at first, it will rapidly grow as they become bigger and cheaper. The first widescale application might well be a third-person an arcade, for example a "model flight sim" where two players sit at a table and dogfight with miniature planes flying in the airspace above the table.

    From there, the possibilities are limitless: interactive digital theater in the round; architecture, interior design; and landscaping; there are hundreds of awesome applications for this new toy!

    It's only disadvantage is the fact that it is, at heart, a giant moving part. So it will tend to be bulky, power hungry, break down frequently and not like vibrations or drops.
  • The main drawback of Actuality's approach is the rapidly spinning screen. It occurs to me that this same technology isn't all too far from being implemented with immobile, solid-state electronics.

    Picture this: a hemisphere of acrylic, crystal or some other clear material, impregnated with millions tiny triplets of red/green/blue light-emitting polymer. The control circuitry for the LEP "pixels" runs vertically throughout the display and is made of the thinnest wires possible, to avoid obscuring any light from escaping the display. (Perhaps the control circuitry is fiber optic, or perhaps it's made of some sort of electrically conductive crystal.)

    The display works on the same principal as an Actuality display--only instead of a rotating screen, we do everything logically, sweeping radially around the display and illuminating all the pixels that lie on a given plane or "slice" at the same time, with the proper colors.

    This approach would use far less energy than an Actuality display, would have a beautifully high refresh rate, and would have better brightness and clarity.

    It might even be possible to get the light-emitting polymer to emit light of a certain polarity, and coat the surface of the display with a material that is polarized so that at any point on the display's outer surface, the only light allowed to pass directly through that point is light that was emitted in phase with the "slice" which runs approximately parallel to the tangent of that point. Don't despair if this sounds like gibberish. What it comes down to is an ultra-crisp display and ludicrously high refresh rates.

    The polarized-light technology is probably impractical, but we should have the manufacturing technology for the basic display within 20 years, maybe sooner if this nanotechnology hype ever goes anywhere.
  • This started out as Gregg's senior project. It was a bit more crude and was monochromatic then, but it did run almost constantly for my senior year ('98) looping through a few different images including a nice 3D Homer Simpson head. Putting aside the tech aspects of this story for a second, I would just like to comment on how nice it is to see an engineer bringing his own idea to fruition in his own company.
  • Why use SCSI instead of AGP? Hmm.. Maybe cuz it's easier to get SCSI cables than AGP cables ;-)
    --
  • Forgot: Due to the principle it's based on the display couldn't display anything non transparent. Every voxel actually glows, so you can't display something like a house and expect the walls to hide what's inside, so you could only see inside through the windows. Everything will shine through. The same problem should apply to the new display.
  • This only works for 3D projections onto 2D screens, because there you know from where the viewer watches the image and therefore can determine which parts have to be hidden.

  • Voxel display from TI (Score:4)

    by chriss ( 26574 ) <chriss@memomo.net> on Tuesday March 27, 2001 @08:35PM (#335443) Homepage
    Back when virtual reality was the future (late '80s), TI had a similar display. It was a fast rotating helix made of a transparant material. Due to the rotation every position inside the dome this thing rotated in was "filled" with material only once during every circle. If you fired a laser at that position when it was filled, it would glow in green or red, depending on the laser. And naturally only that position would glow, because the rest of the dome was empty right then.

    So by rotating and timing the laser one could display volumetric data. Resolution was very low (a cube that occupied 1/5 of the whole height of the dispay consisted of about five voxels in each direction), but it looked pretty cool anyway.

    Price was somewhere between $10K and $50K. TI intended to build a large version for air traffic controllers, so they could walk around a virtual sky in a dome and "see" the planes. Never heard of it again.

    The display by Actuality Systems seems to use the same basic principles: rotation and timed illumination. I hope that this time we'll really see these things on the/a market.

    And yes, I want one.
  • If you follow the test pattern link you might think this whole thing was a hoax just to get /. to post a story about AYBABTU

  • Or to put it simply, they put a magnet around an electron beam and scan it so fast across a phosphor screen you can't tell it's a point on the phosphor anymore.
  • Please explain... I'm confused.
  • Umm... It was a book. "Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH". I guess I didn't remember any spinnie-things in the book, so either I forgot about that part, or (more likely) they added it in the movie version.
  • I think you're talking about Sega's "Time Traveller".

    It just used a parabolic mirror to make the image float there.

    me

  • Re:Voxels? (Score:3)

    by The Original Bobski ( 52567 ) on Tuesday March 27, 2001 @08:39PM (#335449) Homepage Journal
    voxel = volume element = one pint in 3D

    So thats what they've been serving me at the pub!

    Barkeep, A round of voxels!
    ---
  • The million mirrors thingy is already out--it's called DSP and it's what most projectors these days use.
  • obl. disc. site is hosed, so I'm speculating:

    You'll need a vacuum too. To get 50hz, you'll need a 300rpm rotation. If it's a helix, you'll be stuck with a gigantic propellor, and if it is flat, you have a centripetal pump. So you need vacuum.

    (side note: couldn't we just use one of those vapor-trail detectors and two or three low power lasers to acheive 3-d vector display? The idea being that neither beam would be powerful enough on its own to ionize the vapor, but at their intersection, they would combine to have enough power -- or do we run into the limitation that you can't add quanta?)

    Also, both display technolgies have the drawback of being non-occluding. You can't display solid objects, because the front face will be transparent, letting the back shine through.

    This will of course be fine for air traffic control, and for things like displaying MRI scans doctors are already proficient at reading layered data, but it will be a hassle for many potential uses.

    Of course, the ability to select what is displayed will help.
  • Uh, nope.. a 'voxel' is a point or some higher-dimensional sample of some volume.

    Voxels are somtimes thought of as a cubic volume - i.e. the point sample is linearly interpolated in each of the X,Y,Z axes out to some threshold value determined by some means, often the density of that voxel. This is what you are talking about.

    However, Voxels are also often represented using a technique called 'spatting', which is indeed, simply drawing a set of (usually semi-transparent) sprites - one per sample, on screen in back-to-front order. This is what the previous poster is talking about.

    Voxels can also be represented as isosurfaces based on interpolated density values, vector fields, multiple 2D planes generated by 'slicing' the volume as well as others.

    Voxels are certainly not inherently cubic in nature, and stating the only representation of a sampled 3D volume is a set of little cubes is mistaking the definition of a voxel for a rendering method.

  • 3D displays like these are old and how practical are they? I saw one of these like 10 years ago on Beyond 2000. Why move around a display to look around an object when you could just move around virtually with a mouse?

    Nice for advertising, to catch peoples attention, but what else?

  • How about sharpness?

    With a display like this, you need to forego either display sharpness or number of steps around the Z axis.

    More steps, less sharp, as the previous and next image interfers with the current image that the user is looking at.

    It was a problem 10 years ago, and looking at those pictures, would appear to still be a problem.

    Keep dreaming guys. This is not the technology to high quality 3D displays.

  • Unfortunately many modern radars don't report the altitude of an aircraft.

    Seeing the altitude wouldn't really help anyway. A place that's 10km up and 300km (ground distance) away wouldn't display well.
  • 3d Technology Laboratories [3dtl.com] was demoing their 3D Volumetric display at ACM1 [acm.org]. Their approach is to shine 2 different wavelength lasers through a glass or plastic cube (dopant revealed only under NDA). Where they cross, voila. A pinpoint of light. The demo display is a 2-inch glass cube. See the website for pictures. [3dtl.com]
  • If you can get a rotating camera system to do the 3d source for this puppy, imagine the level of detail a movie could have. You could loop through an event, say a heartbeat (from MRI data), and look at it from every concieveable angle. This wouldn't be as realistic as output from a video source, but it would suffice for showing medical uses.

    For a really cool demo, get a camcorder on a spinning mount to match your products, then do a time lapse of a plant germinating. This would allow you to do a frame every second or two in high resolution, making the capture process easy, then you can avoid having to do any hidden surface removal for playback. You could also do the math and do all that to compress it for the finished demo.

    It would be a VERY cool, high resolution demo that wouldn't be replicable on ANY other type of display out there.

    Ok, get a camcoder, a pivot point, some potting soil and seeds... and make me a very cool demo. (I want to see this if you actually do it).

    --Mike--

  • No doubt, what an idiot. Their site has been /. since 11PM last night, and it still is slowed to a crawl.
  • I don't want my FPS'er to get too much more real looking, anymore and it will start too look a bit too much like the real thing. (IMnsHO) Can you imagine 3-D 'victims'?? Thats getting to be a bit much... Not that I think that this ubercool new display is a bad thing or that it is aimed at the gamer market, but it will trickle down eventually...
  • Haha! You actually said CRTs have *lasers* in them, and you say I'm a moron?

    (Note: I was hoping for a +1 funny with my original comment, but I guess nobody can figure out I was being facetious. Yes, even though they really are just a 3D extension of the "floating clock" concept, these displays are actually a very clever idea. "Makes me yawn" was a joke.)

    I think your predictions about 3D UIs are a little over-reaching. 3D interfaces have been around in research labs for years (using OpenGL images on 2D displays), and the big problem is not displaying the images, it's giving the user an easy way to manipulate the images in 3-space. (Your example of using the scroll wheel to represent depth sounds pretty clumsy, really.) The key to 3D UIs rests not with the display, but with the input device, and that's not an easy problem to solve at all. Just look at all the spiffy new 3D-gaming input devices that constantly fail to catch on. It's hard to build a workable 3D input device, and until someone does, volumetric displays will likely remain rather passive devices instead of interactive ones.

  • Yeah, whatever (Score:3)

    by Apotsy ( 84148 ) on Tuesday March 27, 2001 @09:02PM (#335462)
    Same principle as those novelty floating LED clocks [sonic.net], which are themselves a fairly old concept.

    I'd like to see an actual 3D image with no glass case and no rotating display screen. Now that would be something. This just makes me yawn. A neat toy ... big deal.

  • Umm... question... if they used a parabolic mirror to float a 2d image, why not do the same with this 3d image?

    I.e., make this a floor model. Generate the image in a dome hidden in a cabinet, then use parabolic mirrors to float the image above the cabinet for a free-floating image.

  • a previous post mention that the screen was spinning at 600rpm. A glass plate spinning at 600rpm would have to be very well balanced. if it was at all off centered then the thing would mostlike fall over and start spinning around until it broke. I imagine this thing is bolted quite well to their desk.
  • And get your hands, or *something else* whacked by the screen that is spinning at 600rpm.

    echo $email | sed s/[A-Z]//g | rot13

  • you can see that they use one of TI's DSPs to run the unit

    I think you're reading too much into a mere coincidence. TI are big in DSP's, and they've just happened to buy from the same vendor who used to also make a similar product.

  • Mayo Clinic already has a pretty cool machine [uiowa.edu] for making 3-D x-ray movies. In fact, they have had it for about 20 years. They call it a dynamic spatial reconstructor. It used to take days of supercomputer processing to extract the movie from the raw data.
  • All your base are belong to us?

    Hey! You can read /. on this thing too!

    Now I'm impressed. :-)
  • The latest AGP 4X boasts a maximum data-transfer rate of 1,066MBps seems agp is much faster, they probably have their reasons though
  • read the whole thing!
  • For what this thing will cost, you could probably buy a night with any woman on the planet.

    Or you could save your money, get drunk and bang Sarcasta like the rest if us. Take the money you saved and invest in RISC hardware, or plastic surgery. (You can always find a use for plastic surgery. When in doubt, add five inches to your penis.)

    Remember: even Windex won't get semen off an LCD.

    --

  • A Letter to the Editor (Score:4)

    by The_Messenger ( 110966 ) on Tuesday March 27, 2001 @10:16PM (#335472) Homepage Journal
    Hi, Slashdot, my name is Vinnie Vendor, and I have a product to sell. I'd like to advertise this New and Amazing product on your front page, under the guise of being News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters. We both get something out of the deal: I get free publicity, and you get pageviews for your dying site. (And looking at VA's stock price tells me that you need those pageviews, TacoBoy! Ha! Ha!)

    Please respond quickly or I will take my offer to kuro5hin. Unfortunately, I do not think they will accept. Darn their scruples and lack of commercial filth!

    Yours truly,
    Vinnie Vendor
    Director of Lies^H^H^H^HMarketing
    Evil, Inc.

    --

  • Mechanical television sucks (Score:3)

    by Animats ( 122034 ) on Tuesday March 27, 2001 @09:44PM (#335473) Homepage
    The big rotating machinery has got to go. There's a whole history of mechanically scanned TV receivers from the 1930s through about 1950, and fortunately, that technology died out.

    Maybe something involving waves in fluid like Scophony [mindspring.com] would work.

  • I think (without knowing the toy in question) that yours is just relying on persistence of vision as the ring goes round. You can buy (or build) little clocks consisting of a column of LEDs on the end of a stick (or pendulumn), and as you wave the stick around, the LEDs change their display. Persistence of vision makes you see the brighter LED image for longer, so it looks like the message is written in the air. I think there's a version called the SpaceWriter.

    Point is, with the SpaceWriter system the LED has to physically go through the location where you want the pixel. That's the difference - Actuality's one uses projection to do it, so the LEDs stay fixed in the base of the unit. If you had a pillar of LEDs flying around, (a) it'd be difficult to get it to move fast enough, and (b) it'd get in the way of viewing the image from all sides.

    They're definitely missing a trick anyway by not using a version of the Princess Leia film! :-)

    Grab.
  • ...and according to www.pricewatch.com , that much PC133 SDRAM would cost you around $150.

  • How it works (Score:3)

    by Dag Maggot ( 139855 ) on Tuesday March 27, 2001 @09:46PM (#335476) Homepage
    How it Works

    The heart of Actuality's display technology is a high-speed image projection system which illuminates a swiftly rotating proprietary screen. As the screen sweeps out a cylindrical volume, the projector sends out a sequence of 2-D "image slices." These slices, when computed properly and projected in the correct sequence, serve to create a volume-filling 3-D image. Your persistence of vision does the rest.

    Here's how the system works in a deeper level of detail: your application (say, an MCAD system) provides the Actuality display with data via the Actuality API. This geometry information is rasterized and placed into a three-dimensional matrix of memory in the display unit. A high-speed projection system rapidly flips through the 3-D memory in a series of 2-D steps, which we call slices. These slices, when computed properly and selected at the proper times, perceptually combine into a sharp, volume-filling, true 3-D image.

  • hrm from 90 voxels, to 100 million. in about 6 months. can we expect a 10 billion voxel display for chrismas? :P

    Rate me on Picture-rate.com [picture-rate.com]
  • I don't know what you were trying to say, but reading it made my head hurt :P

    Voxels don't have anything more to do with sprites then pixels do. And there is no reason you couldn't make a sprite out of Voxels the same way you could out of pixels, it would just be a 3d one

    To clarify:

    A pixel is a picture-element, one of the squares of color that make up a digital image. If you have a 640x480 picture, then you have a matrix of 640 pixels by 480 pixels arranged in a grid, each with a specific color value.

    A voxel is a volume element, instead of squares of color, you have cubes, and you build your picture the same way you would build something out of legos.

    A sprite is an image that moves around the screen programicaly... Like a video game character, in fact, the term 'sprite' is used almost exclusively when talking about video games. A sprite can be a picture, (like a picture of Mario) or a volume (imagine a 3d Mario built out of blocks). It really doesn't matter.

    A Voxel is not a set of sprites stuck together, there is no version of the term that means this, and whoever told that to you was totally wrong.

    Rate me on Picture-rate.com [picture-rate.com]
  • Okay, I know I'm an ass for saying it, but that was a clever way to attack a dumb sig.

    [shrug] I considered it a dumb way to attack a dumb sig, myself. Your mileage may, of course, vary.

  • ...what I really want is an atomic vector plotter.
    I know where I can get one, but I just can't get myself to enjoy Vogon poetry that much, no matter how hard I try...
  • With the patient inside an MRI machine, they'd have to use unconventional surgical instruments: anything metallic would be really hard to control in the magnetic field. Scalpels made of obsidian?
  • I don't have depth perception: my eyes point in different directions and the images aren't fused. This means that any "3D" display technology that depends on stereo fusion just doesn't work. About 10% of the population has the same sort of problem as me. The Actuality display is real 3D, not cheating like stereo - you can move your head around to see the backs of things.
  • thats just sick
  • Hello, just because you use bits in sets of 8 doesn't mean anything. Did you ever stop to think that since this display uses _3-bit color_ the concept of a "byte" might have little meaning in the 3-D display world. RAM chips are sold by the "bit" anyways. Its only computer usres that make use of the "bytes"
  • It is not animated yet, but soon will be. Bandwidth is the limiting factor and a SCSI connection should provide the required bandwidth to do animation. The globe itself is plastic and larger than a basketball. The image fills up a volume the size of a basketball inside. The image is best viewed with the lights off but it can be seen easily with the lights on. The brightness will increase over the next few months as more effecient projector lamps and mirrors are used.
  • Nope, its DDR RAM which totals about $1500.
  • This display technology is not limited to a single person. It is viewable by many people at one time from _any angle_ (including directly above). Sure, it doesn't like to be dropped. But does your monitor like to be dropped? Sure, it contains moving parts, but doesn't your hard drive, disk drive, CD-ROM drive, refrigerator, etc. Sure, its bulky but so is a 23-inch monitor!
  • I am left wondering if they have taken into account the dangers of this product.
    What happens if a device has a critical failure and the mirror shatters? Would I ever be glad to have a piece of glass thrown out of the machine at high speeds at my neck. Now that would sure be a 3d thrill..
  • You want to see 3D images? There's this stuff called peyote, you see...

  • .. a kick-ass MP3 visualization plugin for ANY of CmdrTaco's MP3 players.

    Not as good as this one [winamp.com], though. Oh. My. God.

    --

  • Uh... There's a chair in the background of one of the pics. Take a look. The thing is probably two feet in diameter (.6M for you metric people). z
  • I must say. But I was wondering, how big is this thing? From looking at the pictures there was no measurements, nor anything to base a scale on. Anyone know the dimensions?
    --
  • Memory: 6 Gbits DDR SDRAM

    How much did _that_ cost?!?!?!?!
    --

  • "What is this 'gigabits of RAM' crap?

    "Bit" is the standard unit of memory used by hardware-oriented folks. "Byte" is for software folks, after the memory has been nicely packaged into eight-bit bytes (which was not always the case), error corrected, and so on.

  • I'd love to see how this looks in action. When it switches between images as the projection screen turns, does it instantly flick from one image to the next, making sharp edges to the voxels, or does it or can it blend between the images? Maybe it's too small and fast to perceive the difference, anyway. Also, the 3d resolution, or density of voxels will decrease the further from the centre of the fishbowl you get, because a point on the projection screen is moving further between images. How does this affect the 3d image? I'm assuming it's projecting a uniform 2d image.. or is it?
  • That was a 2-d image projected off the surface by the mirror mentioned in the last comment. Looks kinda cool, but the image gets a bit distorted and there's no real 3rd dimension to it. IIRC, it was a pretty crappy game too. You can get the same optical effect from that table-top mirage thingy, the one you put some coins or something in the bottom of. The image is projected above the device by a pair of parabolic mirrors. Here's the first link [exploratorium.edu] that I got from Google. There's an explanation a bit more than halfway down the page.

  • Reactions (Score:3)

    by Alien54 ( 180860 ) on Tuesday March 27, 2001 @08:19PM (#335497) Journal
    a quick description, in case it is /.'ed:

    Well, it is NOT free standing out in the open air. and it is not animated.

    It is contained inside a glass sphere. Maybe the size of a basketball, or smaller. The images are of a small section of a DNA strand, roughly one full twist. The quality of the image is similar to a nicely shadowed but obviously computer rendered diagram in 3D (well duh!) It is definitely not photograde, although that by itself should not be a problem.

    The image is shown glowing, but it is in a darkened space, so probably it will not be ready for daylight presentations for a while.

    I am amazed that it is done at all, although it will be a while before it progresses beyond the novelty stage.

  • Yet another system has been developed by Digital Media Associates. (www.3dmedia.com)
  • shouldn't it be: "the thick plottens" ?

  • Sorry, I couldn't resist...

    (I'm one of the founders.)

    The 3-D display is a diffuse sheet that rotates at 600 rpm; as it spins, 2-D images that correspond to "slices" of a 3-D dataset are projected onto the sheet.

    Because the screen is thin, and because of the way it's mounted, (and also, believe it or not, because of the spacing between your eyes) you see a very compelling 3-D image regardless of where you stand. Even from above! It's actually quite cool. But I'm biased, I suppose...

    Gregg Favalora, CTO

  • Why couldn't It just not display what shouldn't be seen?
  • Hmmm... could have been, I was in Jr. High school at the time (and not an avid reader of /. yet).

    Kurdt
  • I saw another version of a 3D display in an arcade years ago, attached to a machine that cost something like $5 to play and seemed a pretty simple game. And this was back in the days when all games cost 25c. Next time I went back to that arcade the machine was gone. Basically, (especially in light of the recent advances in flat-screen technology) will I be able to afford one of these before my kids are my age?

    Kurdt
  • Although given what time we're each posting, I'll just assume we're tired.

    Yeah, i've made some idiotic postings at 4-5 am lately.

    I guess sarsam doesn't work right after a certain hour. :)

    I go to Virginia Tech, but I am dropping out after this semester, to take a full time job, then I will be attending the University of Phoenix Online once I turn 23.

    That way I won't ever have to fucking go to a boring class again. It's www.uophx.com I believe. You can copy and paste if you are interested, I am too lazy to HREF it. :)
    -

  • These displays are still not the "ultimate" in 3D because they aren't true 3D displays. Yes, they give an excellent sense of depth, but they cannot emulate real world images of most objects. The technical reason is that the light generated or reflected by an object can only be properly represented by 4 dimensions of data (not counting wavelength, time and external light sources), but these displays can only really produce 3. To put it in laymans terms, these displays can only represent additively transparent (glowing) objects. You cannot visualize opaque objects properly. This is still useful for scientific visualization, medical imaging, etc... but not all that useful for common real-world applications.
  • There's even better stuff than that going on.

    Check out the Harvard Medical School Surgical Planning Lab [harvard.edu] for instance. They're working on (among other things) a system that allows doctors to perform surgery while the patient is inside an MRI machine, so that the surgeons can literally see what's under their knife before they make the next incision. (Right now it's done on a CRT, eventually they want some sort of HUD overlay.) Very, very cool stuff. If unenclosed holographic projection ever happens, they'll be first in line to use it.

  • Their web site is playing hide'n'seek, so could someone summarize the patent situation with this technology?

    I'm curious, 'cuz I have a "Saturn-5" electronic toy sitting behind me which has a motorized plastic ring with 10 red LED's around it, which flicker as the ring spins. By playing with the timing parameters (2 knobs) I can make various spherical patterns appear. Is this in violation?

    What if I replaced the ring with a circuit board with ~200 LEDs on it (I think Radio Shack has all three colors now)? Although communicating with 200 spinning LEDs would be a challenge in itself .. maybe a spinning mirror would be better .. How much of this is already patented?

    Oh, well, back to work..

    -B

  • Nice.. (Score:3)

    by cmowire ( 254489 ) on Tuesday March 27, 2001 @08:08PM (#335522) Homepage

    It's interesting that they made such a big announcement that their product actually works.. ;)

    It's even funnier to see what their 2D Test Pattern [actuality-systems.com] is. ;)

    That will be nice when they actually get it out and there are a few advances in memory. Unfortunately, it will probably not have the cool sort of holographic effects that they had in Star Wars and Star Trek.

    But I bet that the folks who do military-grade radars will love it. Imagine being able to view the exact 3D position of an aircraft instead of just looking at the overhead view.

    It's just odd to see that they are using SCSI to do the interfacing. SCSI's a lot slower than the AGP port, and you are transfering several hundered times the data.. ;)

  • holography in Medical use (Score:5)

    by deran9ed ( 300694 ) on Tuesday March 27, 2001 @09:04PM (#335525) Homepage
    Holography also have other uses; they enable radiologists to interact with the data that have been collected by scanners and they may facilitate the production of "what if' images which some surgeons have found useful in surgical planning. Programs have concentrated on the parts of the body and the kinds of conditions (i.e., tumors, trauma, and vascular abnormalities) that are commonly examined with CT and MR scanners.

    Studies were designed to determine if the digital holography systems would allow diagnosis of conditions that are extremely difficult or impossible to detect with existing technology; provide for more accurate and comprehensive diagnosis and understanding of conditions that are difficult characterize fully with existing technology; increase the radiologist's confidence in the diagnosis made; reduce the time required to arrive at a diagnosis; facilitate communication of relevant information; improve surgical planning; and allow for more fully informed patient consent to treatment.

    Sure its a cheesy website [virtualave.net] but it has some pretty useful information on the subject.

    privacy [antioffline.com] 101
  • Any geek who gets his hands on one of these and a good modeling program can finally make a true claim to have seen 3D boobs.

    -Vess

  • An Explanation (Score:5)

    by Spy Hunter ( 317220 ) on Tuesday March 27, 2001 @08:16PM (#335537) Journal
    For those of you wondering just how the heck this thing works - it uses a (really fast) conventional 2-D projector and a very complex array of lenses and mirrors to project a constantly changing image onto a 2-dimensional translucent screen that rotates at 600 rpm. By changing the image as the screen rotates, the illusion of a 3-D object is created.

    More technical info (with pictures) can be found here [actuality-systems.com] and a shot of the screen while it's not moving can be seen here [actuality-systems.com].

  • Re:Voxel display from TI (Score:3)

    by Chakat ( 320875 ) on Tuesday March 27, 2001 @10:47PM (#335539) Homepage
    This seems to be the direct descendant of that item. From this page [actuality-systems.com] you can see that they use one of TI's DSPs to run the unit. So it's probably a case of the proof of concept coming out, the engineer realizing the items killer app, and a product team brought in to finish what looks like a six month project. Well, those implementors probably discovered that they didn't have the hardware to sling voxels fast enough to get a system that was both non-sucky (real technical terminology here =) ), and not more money than the GDP of small third-world countries. So the ideas and chips sat idle, occasionally brought out as a plaything when someone decided to do a little spring cleaning. It's only now that we're able to see the technology in a fairly usable state; it was just too expensive before.

    Of course, this is all just wild conjecture, shots in the dark. But it is probably close to the truth.

  • Wow, that sounds about as exciting as watching - oh, never mind.

    --
    "May the forces of evil become confused on the way to your house"

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