Mind-Blowing Interfaces On Display At SIGGRAPH 2009 173
An anonymous reader writes "Tech Review has a roundup of some cool, experimental new interfaces being shown at SIGGRAPH 2009, underway in New Orleans this week. They include an amazing 'touchable holograph' display, developed by a team in Japan, which uses an ultrasound device to simulate the sense of touch as the user grasps objects shown in 3D. The other ideas on display are Augmented Reality for Ordinary Toys, Hyper-Realistic Virtual Reality, 3D Teleconferencing and Scratchable Input Devices. If this is the future of computers, sign me up."
The conference has also seen the release of OpenGL 3.2 by the Khronos Group.
Augmented reality (Score:5, Interesting)
Ever since I first heard of it I've thought augmented reality is going to be big some day. It's not much more than a toy right now (watching the video, it was clear that there's still a long way to go before it reaches it's full promise), but someday it'll be there. At my last job we used a lot of virtual reality modeling to do experimental training programs (learn to weld without real fire kind of stuff). Augmented reality will be so much better for this kind of thing. Think about it. A welder uses a real (modified) torch on a real piece of metal, but his goggles show the metal heating up and reforming. Or combine it with the tactile stuff from the other example and surgeon uses a "real" scalpel in a real operating room, but sees and feels a virtual patient. You could learn and practice very complicated procedures this way.
We're no where near being able to build holodecks, but between this tactile display tech and augmented reality we may not have to. Use the real world as your backdrop, put in real things where ever appropriate, and only simulate the stuff that you actually need to interact with.
Re:ultrasound... (Score:2, Interesting)
How long until there are giant 3-D tentacle monsters that rape Japanese teenagers?
Re:ultrasound... (Score:1, Interesting)
Interesting, now I just had an idea for a novel about someone getting murdered by a hologram. That would be the perfect crime.
Re:TV screens still have a long way to go (Score:4, Interesting)
Yep, that's pretty much right - it's impossible to just stimulate each type of cone individually, no matter what wavelengths of light you use. (As the picture shows, the M and L receptors are particularly similar in terms of response curves.)
This also means that there are combinations of cone cell response that cannot be produced by any light source - so called imaginary colours [wikipedia.org]. (Yes, *any* light source - no matter what mixture of different wavelengths you use, you can't do it. The eye just doesn't respond that way. Certain optical illusions can produce imaginary colours, though.)