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Helloooo HoloDesk! Take a look at this nifty new Kinect-powered gadget from Microsoft that lets you manipulate 3-D virtual images with your hands.
From Steve Clayton of Next at Microsoft Blog:
My favorite is Holodesk, a research project out of the Sensors and Devices group at Microsoft Research Cambridge. I won’t attempt to describe what it does in great detail, except to say that with Holodesk you can manipulate 3-D, virtual images with your hands. Whilst this is only a research project at this stage, I can envisage future applications in areas such as board gaming, rapid prototype design or perhaps even telepresence, where users would share a single 3D scene viewed from different perspectives. I know it sounds very Star Trek but this is not science fiction.
For the record, the Holodesk isn’t the only 3-D interaction experiment out there. But what sets it apart from the rest is the use of beam-splitters and a graphic processing algorithm, which work together to provide a more life-like experience. The video provides a much better explanation, so I’ll leave the explanation at that.
Link - via Techcrunch
Holograms are pretty cool, but they’re lacking in the color department. Well, not for long, perhaps. Photonics physicists from Osaka University in Japan have managed to capture the original colors of an object in 3-D holograms:
The team at Osaka took another approach, they use both lasers and white light. They first fire a laser at an object, say an apple, to create an interference pattern, but instead of just one laser color, they actually use three; red, green and blue.
The interference pattern is then captured on a light sensitive material which is coated with silver (because it contains electrons that are easily excited by white light) and silicon dioxide (to help steer the waves).
They then shine a steady white light on the metal sheathed material exciting the free electrons, causing the creation of surface plasmons, which results in the regeneration of the captured image as a true-color 3-D hologram; one that can be viewed from almost any angle and is the same colors as the original object.
I’m not really sure what is going on in this video, but it appears that two musicians on a turntable and a drum set are using speaking, holographic human heads as instruments. That’s all of the information that I can immediately find. Warning: some NSFW language.
via NerdCore
Researchers at the University of Tokyo are developing tangile holograms — or rather, a system that uses sensors and Nintendo Wiimotes to give the impression of physical contact by holograms:
A retroreflective marker is attached on the tip of user’s middle finger,” the researchers explain on their website. “IR LEDs illuminate the marker and two Wiimotes sense the 3D position of the finger. Owing to this hand-tracking system, the users can handle the floating virtual image with their hands.”
In the video, the researchers demonstrate how a user can dribble a virtual bouncing ball, feel virtual raindrops bouncing off their hand, and feel a small virtual creature crawling on their palm. The researchers hope that the technology will have applications in video games, 3D CADs, and other uses.
"World Builder" is a short film by Bruce Branit (co-creator of "405") in which a man uses holographic tools to create a virtual world for a woman he loves.
The filming was completed in a single day, but the post-production computer graphics required 2 years.
– via vimeo
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