Holographic Displays Coming to Smartphones
spectrum.ieee.org
spectrum.ieee.org
Question is whether people will want to use 3-D on a smartphone. We may be hitting a saturation point where current generation(s) have absorbed enough change, and we may have to wait for the next generation, growing up with "a Cray 2 in your pocket" to be ready for the next big step.
One without 50 Amazon apps trying to constantly sell me things would be preferred.
Aren't modern smartphones far more powerful than a Cray 2?
Excess capacity is a good thing, especially when it's cheap and available to everyone.
Just for comparison, a single Titan Z GPU can preform at 8 TeraFlops, 4000 times that of a Cray 2.
Compare the Amazon Fire Phone. It's got that "3D-ish" display, which is about as close to having a 3D display as you can get without quite going there - and it was received with a resounding "meh."
The thing is that 3d for movies etc. hasn't been done very well. Avatar is still the high water mark in terms of technical polish, but in general it has only been used to build up special effects a little, and there's no visual grammar in the way that one exists for the frame itself. It doesn't add a whole lot extra to the film experience, and it adds even less to the TV experience. Few games were developed to take advantage of the technology, which was a mistake. Projected holograms, however, combine very well with interactive applications. At a later stage you may well see narrative art in hologram form, which could lead to a revival of theatrical performance for a mass audience, but that's 10 years off.
From what we know now, the most likely answer to both of those questions is "no", but things may change once 3D gets widespread.
In practice, though, I don't think it's a compelling enough tool. Nintendo's 3DS handheld console is a case study in offering 3D to content creators as a guaranteed part of the user experience, and yet very few games for it have meaningfully used the tool of perceived depth.
Today, after seeing all the 3D movies, parallax screens, and dynamic perspective stuff, I think I'll pass. It will just be a gimmick.
Is this an inherent property of physics or just a limitation of current technology? Considering the strides that have been made with stuff like Kinect I don't see why we couldn't improve our tech in this area. IMO the biggest roadblock isn't tech but the strides in HCI that need to be made.
So what you see at 45 degrees (polar) angled to the screen would be different than at the normal (90 degrees). Then there's the azimuthal angle as well (you can walk around it if it were laying flat on a desk).
Unless there's some other input indicating to the touchscreen at what angles your eyes are at, determining what you see, there seems to be no way to correlate touch/movement gestures with 3-dimensional surfaces.
This said, I can still stipulate tremendous value in treating all gestures as acting from the perspective of the normal - you would have a 3d image under glass and every touch on the glass corresponds to a z-dimensional intersection with the holograph.
And it still sucks.
The problem with motion controls is that it's a solution looking for a problem. Why would I want to hold my left hand out below my hip at a 45 degree angle and hold for 5 seconds, when instead I can hit the "back" button on my controller, is a mystery.
It's the same problem as voice recognition - good demoware, poor products. We don't speak to our computers because the lag in feedback and the accuracy, while having advanced leaps and bounds, is still strictly inferior to hitting a keyboard (virtual or otherwise).
This is before we get into more fundamental usability problems like having to hold your arms out while interacting with devices. Minority Report should've featured Tom Cruise with gigantic arms, built up from years of holding his arms out in front of him all day just to do basic computing tasks.
Gigantic arms like you get from holding your smartphone the whole day and using it? I would guess that it might be even better to work this way than sitting 8 hours in a chair using the keyboard of your computer or your smartphone.
Also, there are downsides to standing all day, just as there are to sitting.
This is literally, adding another dimension to our UIs. I'm excited to see what people come up with and can't wait to play with it myself.
The first application you will see is Ringers; when someone calls you, a little glowing globe (or dice, or butterfly, or...) appears in the air above your phone and you wave your hand to answer. There will be a bunch of 3d0animation 'visual ringtones' sold to this end.
People will get in the habit of laying their phone on a table as a display just to show this off - yes, this means there will be a minor epidemic of phone theft, more stories about thieves being trapped by the very phones they stole, all of which create favorable publicity for new technology by positioning it as something highly desirable and therefore worthy of theft.
Smartphones with holographic displays will have small tiwn (or quad) cameras mounted at the corners with face-detection software. This will generate a partial stereo image of your face as you look down at the hologram, which will in turn be a partial stereo image of the caller's face looking back at you but floating above the screen. Is this directly useful? Not so much. Will it be annoying to other people in the vicinity, like bluetooth headsets on people who appear to be talking to themselves, or some people's strange habit of holding their phone up to their mouth like a slice of pizza, while their conversation partner buzzes loudly through the speaker? Damn right, and the curmudgeonly articles write themselves (I'm angry at these people already - aren't you?).
But will it at the same time be awesomely cool to be able to hold conversations with little hologram head-and-shoulders people, as long as you do it discreetly? Oh yes it will. Businesses will pay $$$ for larger models that can project life-size head and shoulders for telepresence meetings, because that will feel about 100x more meaningful than talking to people on a video wall.
What else can you do besides talk to people and get voicemail from kidnapped princesses? Well, there are games, where there's a whole universe of possibility even on the crappy bounded confines of model 1.0 cellphones. Successful games and toys do not have to be complicated or even clever, in fact for new technology it's better if they're stupid simple to drive adoption as widely as possible. Obvious candidate: a little holographic Rock'em Sock'em robot fight, where you struggle with your phone or a friend by wiggling your finger tip in the vicinity of your robot until one of you 'wins'. Is this stupid? Yeah. so is the original toy, and that still sells for $20. Along the same lines, holographic origami sumo wrestlers who respond to your fingertip tapping on the table next to your phone.
I could go on and on, and I haven't even brought up ipad-size tablets yet. Send money for more futurism ;-)
There's nothing floating in the air. No one knows how to do that yet. This is just a more advanced version of the lenticular display on the Nintendo 3DS.
Calling this a hologram is as semantically accurate as calling a digital movie a "film".
Ultimately we DO want glasses. A single holograpic display per eye would be fine and would allow looking around by moving your eyeballs instead of your head in a VR context. This could be a couple of square inches (or less) of hologram per eye.