A Kinect Princess Leia Hologram In Realtime 112
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:Fake 3D ftw (Score:5, Interesting)
Interesting point.
How about Real 3D porn?
Like walking around a coffee table and seeing the two chicks digging on each other, and *you* get to choose the angle you want to view it at?
There's more money in that to be made then pharmaceuticals.
Re:Soooo (Score:5, Interesting)
I dont really know if it would really work or not, but I've had this idea for an interferometer based "holo-tank" for over a year now.
(I really don't care if somebody steals this idea.)
The phenomenon of self-interference is the life-blood of traditional holography-- basically, one beam is split in a beam splitter, one of the resulting beams scans an object, while the other then interferes with the refracted light from the scanning beam as it exposes a photographic plate.
traditional holography [knowledgerush.com]
This stores the interference pattern on the plate, so that when it gets illuminated by laser light of the same frequency, a virtual 3D image of the scanned object gets produced.
That's basic holography; The idea I have in mind is quite a bit different:
Since this is slashdot at least some of you guys will be familiar with the micro-mirror arrays found in some modern DLP projection television sets, (For those that are not, here is an obligatory wikipedia link [wikipedia.org].) and probably some of you already know about multi-mode lasers for use in frequency combs. (Another obligatory wikipedia link [wikipedia.org].)
Essentially, you take the beam from a multimode frequency comb laser that is calibrated to produce a series of discrete frequency spikes within the visible light spectrum, and run it through a beam splitter, just like traditional holography.
However, instead of sending one beam to interact with a real object as the scanning beam, you direct BOTH beams onto DLP chips. These DLP chips reflect and refract the laser light so that the beams will have a very subtle phase incongruity when they intersect within a transparent medium. This causes the beams to interfere with each other and scatter at the point of intersection. By carefully controlling the beam lengths to be highly specific to the individual frequency spikes of the laser comb's beam, you can modulate the apparent "color" of the glowing 'dot'. (Or, at least I think you should be able to anyway.)
Now, if you "Scan" the two lasers over the DLPs, you should be able to use them to produce a purely computer generated holographic image, in something that would approach real color. (Would not be true real color, because of the discrete nature of the laser comb you are using.)
Due to issues of blinding people with the laser light, you would need to project the image inside of a transparent block of material, like high clarity glass or crystal, with some kind of beam trap at the far end-- however, this "tank" doesnt need to be very thick to theoretically produce a nice 3D object. I would think a mere quarter inch thick would be more than sufficient.