3-D TV? How about holographic TV? (via kinect)

web.mit.edu

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Looking into Stephen Benton, the holographic video guru mentioned, I found the Mark II display mentioned in the article:

http://www.media.mit.edu/spi/M2.html

Some numbers: To acheive [sic] the goal of a 150x75x75mm image... Each horizontal line of the display is 256-thousand pixels of holographic fringe pattern translating to 36Mbytes of information per frame, fed at a total data rate of 2Gpixels/sec into the display from the frame buffers.

It's a little bit confusing---I think the article's author is a non-technical writer rather than someone involved with the project---but it sounds like this is more about holographic capture rather than holographic display. (Which makes the kinect connection make a bit more sense.)

It also covers holographic display:

At the receiving end, a PC with three commercial graphics processing units -- GPUs -- computes the diffraction patterns.

The one component of the researchers’ experimental system that can’t be bought at an electronics store for a couple hundred dollars is the holographic display itself. It’s the result of decades of research that began with MIT’s Stephen Benton, who built the first holographic video display in the late 1980s. ... The current project uses a display known as the Mark-II, a successor to Benton’s original display that both Benton’s and Bove’s groups helped design.

I love the fact that they are trying to make it cheap, it does not have to be perfect if it's cheap. Even if it looks as bad and is small as princes Lea's hologram, if it's cheap enough, I and every star wars fan will buy one.

AFAIK it's not possible to project out into open space like that with real holograms.

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