Results 1 to 6 of 6

Thread: Wow!!!! I want one...

  1. #1
    Join Date
    Aug 2007
    Location
    Under a rock in Cambridge UK
    Posts
    1,353

    Default Wow!!!! I want one...


  2. #2
    Join Date
    Jun 2006
    Location
    Charlotte, NC
    Posts
    1,125

    Default

    yep, pretty cool. Too bad they had one of these on star wars in the 1970s
















    i know it was simulated

  3. #3
    Join Date
    Feb 2007
    Location
    Finland
    Posts
    4

    Default

    Hmm.. I got few theories how that works.. I need to think more about it to make sure it's possible..

  4. #4
    Join Date
    Feb 2007
    Location
    Finland
    Posts
    4

    Default

    Ok, it seems like they have polarized glass or film between those triangle shaped surfaces. They use pyramid shapes, because in that way the image they project on 90 degree angel against each triangle wall doesn't hit the other wall at any point. This way they can make the perfect illusion that you see 3d image.

    The truth is that they just have rendered the image from 4 directions and run it from video projector that has polarized filter. Then the film hanging on the trush reflects only that certail polarized light back at you. Thus making the optical illusion that the image hangs on air.

    This is my few pennies to crack that patent

  5. #5
    Join Date
    Jul 2005
    Location
    Flying over a town near you
    Posts
    1,404

    Default

    Until I get to take it apart..........then I will believe........
    You are the only one that can make your dreams come true....and the only one that can stop them...A.M. Dietrich

  6. #6
    mixedgas's Avatar
    mixedgas is offline Creaky Old Award Winning Bastard Technologist
    Infinitus Excellentia Ion Laser Dominatus
    Join Date
    May 2007
    Location
    A lab with some dripping water on the floor.
    Posts
    9,890

    Default

    Quote Originally Posted by MechEng3 View Post
    Until I get to take it apart..........then I will believe........
    YAWN!!!

    That is highly dependant on how the rendering works, there is one out there using spinning tilted planes with a hologram on them to control reflectivity and a single video projector that blows that out of the water.
    I've been seeing these since 1988 guys, the technology has been there for a long time, its just now the rendering computers are catching up with the display hardware. There are still viewing angle problems, although its up from ~20 degrees when I was in high school to say 45' now. Most either have horizontal parallax or vertical parallax but not both at the same time.
    I'm only seeing horizontal on that unit.

    One of the better tabletop ones is a large square crystal of a special glass with galvo sets on the side, it "adds" two IR beams intersecting in a point inside the crystal into a visible emission. A beautiful young PhD lady showed up at ILDA one year pre 9-11 with that looking for funding and scanner help and found it, she had about 30 guys chasing her around the hotel hitting on her and buying her drinks etc. She came away with a husband and two funding sources that I know of, and I bet she builds them for DOD and we'll never see it again for years. Before they did it in crystals, they did it in tanks of mercury vapor.

    One of the neater ones released recently used a chiller and some cool aerodynamics to condense water vapor in the air into a thin film of fog, making a hanging projection screen in free space. Gave a new name to vaporware, as it was simple according to the marketing promos, but how come I still cant buy it two years later.......

    BTW, the team of programmers on that particular one (called cheoptics, really its like UC-Berkley) posted is 60+ graduate students who have been working on that as a joint team and what it can do is still very limited. You wont see walkaround camera (I mean camcorder) to 3D projection in real time using these technologies for a long time, the high bandwidth data paths and storage dont quite exist yet.... Think of the costs of 60 phds doing code.

    MECHENG is right, I'll belive it when I can buy one at less then General Motors or DOD costs (thats MOD for you UK folks)
    GM uses a similar technology for previewing car deigns.

    BTW if you want to do it with G120 galvos, go to a older library, find the 1986 edition of Circuit Cellar magazine with the sorce code, and get yourself a spinning disk. YOu can project a rotating pyramid or barn with a fast 8085 or 8080 and a few eproms, its not that hard.

    Transparencey (seeing through the object) is the issue, and that little problem was only solved (outside of the DOD) in the public ream last year, and I'll bet this company is a spinoff of that.

    NEOS, the pcaom folks, sold one to the military in the 1990s, using a pair of AOMS at 1 gighertz as AODs scanning onto a spinning helix, the problem at the timne was computing power, not hardware. I heard rumors its on subs for visualizing the 3D relationship between the sub and incoming torpedos, but then again, thats a rumor.

    The last startup we talked to here at work wanted 250K$ up front for a small one, with no guarentee that it could even accept our simple data format etc. My bosses attitude was that we could hire a lot of our own programmers for that.

    Steve
    Last edited by mixedgas; 10-25-2007 at 06:25.

Posting Permissions

  • You may not post new threads
  • You may not post replies
  • You may not post attachments
  • You may not edit your posts
  •