Perspecta Walk Around 3D Display

Spinneyhead writes "New Scientist reports on the Perspecta display, a goldfish bowl like device that displays moving images in such a way that they seem to "float" within the display. "To display the image, software inside the Perspecta chops a 3D model generated by the computer into 198 separate pieces, like slices of cake, which are then projected onto the screen in quick succession by a graphics accelerator that feeds image slices to an optical system mounted below the screen. The result looks to the viewer like a 3D image composed of 100 million "volume pixels" or "voxels".""

Cool, but kind of small

[Anonymous Monkey]

I read the atricle, it sounds realy cool. But isn't 12cm kind of small for use in air trafic controll. "sorry, i can't see your blip because it's behind another blip" I think screen flicker isn't as bad of a thing as size.

Has to remain small scale for now...

[A Dafa Disciple]

The product in TFA is only 25cm in diameter, and if the featured image of the display is up to scale, then its display dome is going to be about 20cm in height. I can't imagine the display of this thing can be too good from underneath with the bottom of this device in the way. It is also stated in TFA that, in order for this thing to work, the screen on the inside has to spin at 15 revs/sec.

You can imagine the complexity of this device as it grows in scale. Even having a version of it at double the width and height is going to cause issues in trying to control the stability of all of its components. The velocity of the outermost edge of the screen (closest to the enclosing dome) is going to increase significantly as the device increases in size. All the while, you're creating a tornado within the dome.

I'm afraid that large scale versions of this device are going to be infeasible in functionality, production, and especially cost (this baby version costs 40 grand) as many complications are going to arise.

Re:How does this work?

[njcoder]

"I still can't figure out how this gives the appearance of 3D. Can someone explain this for the physics-challenged?

Take a flashlight. Tie a string to the end, go out at night and spint it around really fast by the string. It looks like a circle. That's basically it.

Wow! That was _SO_COOL_!!!

[Lord Bitman]

In 1998, when I saw it on "C|Net".

Re:Volumetric display without rotation

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmm... the frequencies don't add the way you think they do. You'd want a large array of beams, all of the same frequency, and you would focus them on one point, with the phases adjusted so they constructively interfere. This would have the side effect of slightly activating other "voxels", but if you had enough beams it wouldn't be severe. While you're at it, you could use fluorescence instead of the process you're describing, which I *think* would work better.

In addition, with the method you're suggesting, you might have to worry about polarization of the light, because an excited state with angular momentum isn't spherically symmetric, so it won't release a photon in every direction with equal probability.

Re:Arrgh, Refresh rate!!

[Heisenbug]

My newspaper refreshes, uh, zero times per second, and still doesn't hurt my eyes. The length of time the things *stay* fresh once refreshed is also relevant ...