A Kinect Princess Leia Hologram In Realtime

mikejuk writes with this snippet from I, Programmer: "True 3D realtime holography is not only possible — it makes use of a Kinect as its input device. A team at MIT has recreated the famous 3D Princess Leia scene from the original Star Wars — but as a live video feed! It's a great stunt but don't miss the importance — this is realtime 3D holography and that means you can view it without any glasses or other gadgets and you can move around and see behind objects in the scene. This is more than the flat 3D you get in movies."

Re:"real holography"

[2themax]

The article linked to in the article http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2011/video-holography-0124.html [mit.edu] explains the actual holographic video generation part in more detail. They are using arrays of lasers to make fringe/interference patterns. This IS "real holography", just very low resolution and framerate.

Re:"real holography"

[SuricouRaven]

It's a computed hologram. The idea has been around for a while as a way to make a true 3D display, but held back by two missing technologies: A ridiculously high resolution screen, and a ridiculous amount of processing power to drive it. They have solved both, the latter by the use of a multi-GPU computer. Impressive. It's not practical yet, but it's a good start. Throw maybe a hundred times the processing power at it, and an even higher resolution display so you can do blue and green laser holography too, and it could produce an image indistinguishable from placeing a real object behind the screen.

Bah

[93 Escort Wagon]

I watched the video. The summary is very misleading - it's talking about where this may, someday, end up. Looking at the so-called real-time hologram, without foreknowledge you wouldn't be able to guess what was being reproduced, even if you were given 20 guesses. Someday this may end up as something cool - maybe.

This is only news because hacking the Kinect is currently a trendy topic in certain tech circles - so any Kinect-related story is getting airtime, no matter how immature (speaking tech-wise) and non-newsworthy.