Japanese Scientists Create Touchable Holograms | Hacker News Reader

Japanese Scientists Create Touchable Holograms

english.ntdtv.com

85 pointswiks23 comments

I am baffled to see this story up again. In fact, this was introduced at SIGGRAPH a year ago http://www.alab.t.u-tokyo.ac.jp/~siggraph/09/TouchableHologr...

I remember this because I must have jumped around for a week after seeing that video.

What do you mean by jumping around?

Probably jumping for joy, as any star wars/trek fan should.

Alternatively, if you jumped around energetically enough (like a Klingon, say) you might generate the acoustic radiation pressure needed to make your own touchable hologram. Of course the two theories are not mutually exclusive.

How many months until someone comes up with an application for this in the adult industry? As with home video and web streaming video, could be another technology accelerated by porn....

I'm not sure why you are being downvoted. There are plenty of non-pornographic applications, but the porn industry could very well accelerate the adoption of this technology. It won't happen in months, no, but I can see holographic porn becoming a reality within 10 years or so.

ha. well, I was mostly joking, but the usefulness of this kind of tele-presence, haptic feedback system, whatever you call it- is going to be determined by how accurate they can make it.

One of the first revenue generating applications that came to mind in which they wouldn't have to make it very accurate would be porn.

"Up until now, holography has been for the eyes only, and if you'd try to touch it, your hand would go right through. But now we have a technology that also adds the sensation of touch to holograms."

Clearly I missed something here -- what are they using to create the holograms?

Curved mirrors. So not movie holograms; you can't put anything behind the projections. That makes the illusion very fragile at some touch surfaces. The sensation technology has the same projective limitation, so you can't have anything else opposite to your hand.

Together, they could give a reasonable hemisphere of touch and sight. However, the touch technology is separate and will work with any hologram in a controlled space.

Touchless door and light switches appears to be used extensively in Canadian hospitals. Without any holograms though.

An isolated light switch on a wall is easy to produce with a sensor and marking showing where to wave your hand. A panel full of buttons and switches is another thing altogether.

I clicked expecting this to be one of those terribly misleading science headlines, but this actually sounds really cool.

I wonder how much this can be tuned to create a variety of "materials", or if it's limited to a simple novelty sensation like making your fingertips vibrate a bit when you touch it.

Yeah, this reminded me of Blackberry putting buttons behind their touchscreens to make them click, or the cheap touchscreen feature phones that vibrate whenever you tap something. Still very cool in this application though.

Soon we will all know the joy of accidentally creating a real-life professor Moriarty who we have to defeat using only our powers of deductive reasoning!

I don't like how they call it "the sensation of touch," when it's really just the illusion of touch.

> The technology consists of software that uses ultrasonic waves to create pressure on the hand of a user "touching" the projected hologram.

How do you suppose putting pressure on the hand creates the illusion of touch, other than by the sensation of touch? Would anything, for you, count as the sensation (and not merely the illusion) of touch, other than having an actual solid object there?

My point is you wouldn't actually 'feel' it, therefore you wouldn't get back the 'sensation' of touching something. Yes you would _see_ a response, but you would not _feel_ the response. Ergo, illusion.

EDIT: For your enjoyment, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultrasonic_sensor, you simply do not feel ultrasonic sound waves.

No, the whole point of the thing is that you can feel it (or at least they claim you can).

Did you not see the paper being moved?

Have you never heard of the phantom limb phenomenon in amputees?

The distinction seems a little iffy, but I can see how there's a difference between the sensation of touch and the illusion of touch. You get the illusion because you're expecting to feel the sensation of touch and you feel something, however if you were to really sit there and analyze what you're feeling you'd realise that it isn't quite the same as the actual touch sensation.

It's like the old ice-cigarette trick -- you pretend you're going to burn someone on the back of the neck with a cigarette, but instead you touch them with a piece of ice. They'll get the illusion of heat from the actual sensation of cold, because... well, our brains are dumb sometimes.

Well, that and extreme cold can feel a lot like a burning sensation.

Yeah, it isn't real. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OA3WGf9pX0A

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