[Science News]
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A screen currently under development reveals an object’s sides when you peek around it. And an in-the-works teleconferencing system made of a spinning mirror can conjure up floating faces worthy of the Wizard of Oz. Other approaches bypass the trickery completely and go straight for the tried-and-true 3-D experience of holography: A postcard-sized Princess Leia made her debut earlier this year (SN Online: 1/26/11), and the military recently acquired a prototype table akin to Dr. Morbius’.
“The technology is getting closer to creating something that looks like a sculpture made out of light,” says Gregg Favalora, a veteran 3-D display designer who works for the consulting company Optics for Hire in Arlington, Mass.
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Douglas Lanman of MIT’s Media Lab and his colleagues are attempting to solve the problem with objects that rotate as a person walks by.
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Four LCD screens stacked on top of one another show videos from up to seven viewpoints via the same trick. The display will be presented this month in Hong Kong at a meeting of the Association for Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques.
A second approach out of Lanman’s lab mashes together many pairs of perspectives into a single image on an LCD screen. A pattern on a second overlying screen flickers faster than the eye can see, filtering the image for different viewing angles.
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At the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, Paul Debevec has figured out a way to pack hundreds of different viewing angles together to eliminate eyestrain. He’s ditching flat screens in favor of a rapidly flickering projector. It bounces images off a pair of aluminum plates jointed together like an A-frame tent, a double-sided mirror of sorts that spins 900 times per minute.
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“The holographic display is the closest to how human beings see around themselves,” says Nasser Peyghambarian, a physicist at the University of Arizona in Tucson. …
His first prototype, a transparent plastic screen slightly larger than a playing card, updated only once every two seconds, a far cry from movies’ 24 to 30 frames per second. Since reporting on the device last year in Nature (SN: 12/4/10, p. 8), he has increased the size to a foot on each side, but still hasn’t achieved the 10 frames per second he is shooting for.
At MIT, engineer Michael Bove has used mostly inexpensive, off-the-shelf parts to make small holographic videos that update 15 times per second. He is in talks with the electronics industry about developing a television that might cost no more than a few hundred dollars to build. Currently, though, the display is fuzzy and in just one color.
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The largest holographic video display to date, measuring 6 feet diagonally, belongs to the military. For five years, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, funded the development of a tabletop display that projects videos up to a foot high, visible from angles greater than 45 degrees above the table.
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Ultimately, the introduction of new 3-D technologies into the home may be stymied by a problem that even the cleverest engineer can’t solve: “There hasn’t been a huge wave of 3-D content yet into the marketplace,” says Stephen Baker, vice president of industry analysis for NPD Group, a market research company headquartered in Port Washington, N.Y.
Realistic 3-D television displays won’t be worth much if there’s nothing to watch. In the end, moviemakers must choose to film in three dimensions and network sports producers need to decide that basketball games really do look better with a little depth.
Read the full story here: http://www.sciencenews.org/view/feature/id/336554/title/Out_of_the_Box