SolidLight offers a true holographic video display | Hacker News Reader

SolidLight offers a true holographic video display

techhive.com

51 pointsdanboarder23 comments

That demo looks very demo, as in works only in super special narrow circumstances. EDIT: ha, only the blurry chameleon is generated by their tech, diorama is IRL Meatspace prop with good old mechanical actuator. Its a trick.

I was expecting a story on https://voxon.co. Dude who started writing Build engine (Duke Nukem 3D etc) while still in high school works for them https://voxon.co/behind-scenes-voxon-chief-computer-scientis...

Thanks. Hopefully he'll port Duke Nukem to it.

There are so many startups working on this tech now that my faith is growing. Everything that is sci-fi keeps coming true.

Even if it’s only the chameleon, I think that’s a pretty good demo.

How is it a trick? The sentence right below the embedded video explicitly says only the chameleon is a hologram, seems hard to miss. It’s also still impressive nonetheless.

Hey that’s neat! I remember writing an email to Ken Silverman back around 1999, maybe 10 years old, and asking for advice on how to get in to programming. He actually responded and gave me a few books to check out.

CNET explains the tech further here and the reporter used a magnifying glass to zoom in on the 3D display, apparently it's high res, requires no glasses to view in 3D:

https://youtu.be/7oGtgbsmmg8

https://youtu.be/rF0ooPdmF8o

Found this presentation while digging, intro is interresting for people wanting to roughly cover 3d displays and what’s holographic vs hyped stereo or mirror displays.

They go more in depth with the tech around the 20 and 26 minutes mark but won’t show actual stuff.

Not a whole lot of substance there. I can't tell if there's anything significant to the tech.

Adam Savage's Tested went further in depth on this tech in the video below, you can see 3D without glasses.

How Lightfield Displays Will Make Holograms Possible https://youtu.be/PgiyoweaPb4

I have a display from Project Looking Glass (Kickstarter version), one of the makers of this tech, it's somewhat low res but very impressive and open for content generated in apps like Blender or 3D cameras.

According to the article this is completely different and waaaay more advanced tech.

None of those look like the same thing

> Holding a magnifying glass up to the object looked exactly like it would with a physical chameleon.

Holy shit

This is obviously a lie as in their own demo video it's very clearly not a physical chameleon.

Remember articles like this are PR pieces. Specifically written to sell the product and find more investors in the company.

Sounds amazing, but smells like hype. Will reserve judgment.

An interesting strategy to approach it as a light field rather than a projection onto a plane.

It seems to me that these things which most readily are useful for "entertainment" and "museums" don't get the level of investment dollars they need when they solve a real problem that someone has. As a result I fear for it's longevity.

Still, the Foveon camera was a good example of the cool stuff you could do with computational photography, perhaps computational displays like this one will find a niche.

>solve a real problem that someone has

Such as..

Pornography, of course. Porn funded much of the Internet's growth. Eventually people found other uses for the Internet but the porn is still there.

So lets say you could do better air traffic control at busy airports this way by having a table projecting a 3D representation of all the traffic in the air so one could instantly see both altitude conflicts and heading conflicts. Could you reduce strain on the controllers? Could you make it effective enough so that you could fly planes closer together and get more traffic through an airport?

I can't wait for holographic jump scares.

Holo walls would be awesome. Can these displays work if they're set up in a grid?

At least this time the article clearly make the distinction of people using the buzzword vs. the notion of a lightfield. Author seems to know the basics and got geuinely impressed so for once now I am cautiously curious. Wondering if they will show something at CES?

Sadly, I watched this on my 2d display. I expected an HD vs SD "simulated picture" type of thing but that didn't really happen. One has to just imagine what it might look like.

Nice. The MIT Media Lab was trying to do that years ago. Somebody finally did it. Now to solve the cost problem.

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