Out of the box: 3-D entertainment steps beyond the glasses and headaches.

[military aerospace . com]

… 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-sidedmirror of sorts that spins 900 times per minute. …

“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. “It’s the Holy Grail of all displays.”

… He’s creating a new kind of holographic plastic that canbe rapidly imprinted, erased and imprinted again.

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 devicelast 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 tobuild. Currently, though, the display is fuzzy and in just one color.

For any holographic display, the bottleneck is the sheer amount ofdata going into each image. Increase the size of the image, the number of colors, how often it refreshes or how steep an angle it can be seen from, and the required processing power explodes, quickly reaching unmanageable proportions.

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. …

Whether any of these new 3-D displays will make the transition into the home remains to be seen. Other technologies developed over the years have come and gone, such as a colorful device developed by the now-defunct Actuality Systems that looked like a glowing crystal ball.

“The market for these technologies wasn’t big enough,” says Nick Holliman, who studies 3-D displays at Durham University in England.

He thinks that new glasses-free approaches will be adopted first by specialized groups. Beyond the military, car designers and oil companies are interested in 3-D displays. Hospitals may also be a natural fit. …

Ultimately, the introduction of new 3-D technologies into the homemay 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 forNPD 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 threedimensions 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.militaryaerospace.com/news/2012/01/1574824419/out-of-the-box-3-d-entertainment-steps-beyond-the-glasses-and-headaches.html