{"id":4881,"date":"2010-10-28T20:08:00","date_gmt":"2010-10-29T01:08:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/?p=4881"},"modified":"2010-10-29T10:00:00","modified_gmt":"2010-10-29T15:00:00","slug":"eccescopy-part-4","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/?p=4881","title":{"rendered":"Eccescopy, part 4"},"content":{"rendered":"

If you’re going to create virtual objects that appear to float in the air between people, one way to do it is to actually put a virtual object in the air between people. This seems to be the principle of the Holodeck from Star Trek, the Next Generation<\/i>. Such approaches have the disadvantage that you need some kind of site-specific projection device, so they are most likely not going to scale up to inhabit the entire shared world around us.<\/p>\n

As I mentioned in an earlier post, an early fictional version of this projection-based approach is the one developed by the Krel in the 1957 film Forbidden Planet<\/i>, clearly a direct inspiration for what George Lucas put on the screen twenty years later:<\/p>\n


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\nArt imitates art<\/i>
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Around 2002 Jeff Han and I collaborated on a project to try to make something for real, which we called Holodust.<\/p>\n

Our basic approach was to draw the virtual object with a laser beam directly onto a cloud of dust. Of course you don’t know the exact position of each particle in a cloud of dust, which is why our plan was to use two<\/i> lasers: An infrared laser would sweep through the cloud. Whenever it happened to hit a dust particle that it would be useful to illuminate, a second — visible — laser would flash, thereby lighting up just that one dust particle.<\/p>\n

And here is a link to some Java applets simulating a Holodust display<\/a>:<\/p>\n


\n<\/a>
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Here is a visualization of what a Holodust display might look like, together with a photo from an experiment that Jeff built to test the principle:<\/p>\n


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Note that there is a big distinction between such displays and, say, the Heliodisplay<\/a> by IO2 Technology, which projects a flat image seemingly in thin air (actually into a thin sheet of water mist). The Heliodisplay is not eccescopic, since you don’t see a different image when you walk around it.<\/p>\n

In contrast, the wonderful 360o<\/sup> Lightfield Display<\/a> at USC is indeed more eccescopic than Holodust, because even the shading of the virtual object can change as you look at it from different directions. Unfortunately, it relies on a slanted metal mirror rotating at very high speed, so it you tried to touch it you would most likely destroy both the display and your hand.<\/p>\n

Sometimes art imitates life. When I see the little sparkly dustlike particles in the air within the floating display of a virtual brain from Joss Whedon’s recent TV series Dollhouse<\/i>, I definitely get the impression that it’s supposed to operate through some kind of Holodust:<\/p>\n


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\n<\/center><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

If you’re going to create virtual objects that appear to float in the air between people, one way to do it is to actually put a virtual object in the air between people. This seems to be the principle of the Holodeck from Star Trek, the Next Generation. Such approaches have the disadvantage that you … Continue reading “Eccescopy, part 4”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4881"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4881"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4881\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4901,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4881\/revisions\/4901"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4881"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4881"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4881"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}