| Author | Message | ||
     beej Rating: N/A |
from the cover story of this month's IEEE Spectrum (available at http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/WEBONLY/publicfeature/apr05/04053d.html ) neat stuff... i want a volumetric display  ===== 3-Deep New displays render images you can almost reach out and touch By Alan Sullivan A SPACESHIP COMMANDER ASKS for a status update from his pilot as they gaze at a transparent, dome-shaped navigational display. In it they see a three-dimensional model of the ship and its orientation in space as it speeds toward the mysterious planet Altair IV and a fateful rendezvous with the demented Dr. Morbius. This scene, from the 1956 film Forbidden Planet, features a primitive wood, metal, and plastic incarnation of what has become a cinematic sci-fi archetype—3-D displays that let you see things much as you do in the real world, only in miniature, typically. The hyperrealistic 3-D display, whether it appears as the holodeck recreational environment in "Star Trek" or as the flickering holographic SOS sent by Princess Leia via R2D2 in Star Wars, underscores not only some sort of fundamental human longing but also a common assumption about high-end 3-D displays: they're way out in the future. They're not. For decades we've had less-than-scintillating experiences watching monster movies through flimsy red-and-blue glasses and playing video games in wraparound headache-inducing goggles. Now, volumetric displays are finally here—displays that render images in a 3-D space rather than on a flat screen. But unless you're in the military, wrestle with high-end 3-D scientific visualizations, or are given to spending US $40 000 on impressive high-tech gadgets, you've probably never seen one. A few small companies are just now emerging to try to carve out a piece of a market for volumetric displays that could be worth $1 billion by 2006, according to a study commissioned by my company, LightSpace Technologies Inc., Norwalk, Conn. These companies are pursuing two main technological approaches to displaying solid images electronically. One is known as swept volume; it uses a high-definition projector or an array of lasers to bounce images off a screen that rotates so fast that the human eye perceives only a 3-D image floating in space. Among those pursuing the swept-volume approach are Felix 3D-Display, in Stade, Germany; Genex Technologies Inc., in Kensington, Md.; and Actuality Systems, in Burlington, Mass. (whose hemispherical displays bear an uncanny similarity to Forbidden Planet's navigation dome). The other approach, taken by LightSpace, is an all solid-state design that uses a projector behind a stack of 20 liquid-crystal screens to create one solid image from a rapidly projected series of images. **snip** We are now fine-tuning the DepthCube architecture for different markets. For example, there is a modest market for very expensive 3-D displays with diagonals of more than 50 inches. These displays, costing more than $100 000, are useful in air-traffic-control rooms and for collaboration among engineers and scientists in the automotive, aerospace, and oil and gas industries. However, the largest market for volumetric 3-D displays is for single-user desktop displays that cost less than $5000 and can be used continuously for any 3-D visualization you can imagine. We hope to demonstrate such a display later this year. Success with less-expensive displays for technical applications will open the door to institutional and consumer markets. High school biology students could forgo the queasy trial of hands-on animal dissections by simply gathering around the classroom volumetric display to view the innards of any creature in the lesson plan. Home shopping, or even dating, via the Web might be less fraught with uncertainty. Is that a crack in the vase I want to buy on eBay or merely a scratch in the paint? Are those hair plugs or is that mane really all his? Amateur cosmologists could probe the deepest reaches of space, orbit stars, and pass through nebulae, or survey far-off worlds. Even forbidden ones. ABOUT THE AUTHOR Alan Sullivan is president and CEO of LightSpace Technologies Inc., Norwalk, Conn. He was formerly the CTO of Vizta3D/Dimensional Media Associates, where he began the development of the DepthCube technology. === marc | ||
| clyde Rating: N/A |
the link above is also features an anaglphy image of the girl Red lens over right eye |
