VoxieBox Displays 3D Images Just Like R2D2’s Message from Princess Leia | Hacker News Reader

VoxieBox Displays 3D Images Just Like R2D2’s Message from Princess Leia

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67 pointsmortenjorck35 comments

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I know (and worked with) the founder and inventors, who are based in Adelaide.

It's a real system, works just like the videos. They have been working on this for years, since at least 2008.

Well done Will and Gav!

Plenty more videos available from https://youtu.be/hi1UiGr6Iow

Thanks Nick!

I don't think R2D2 was projecting inside a little box.

Correct, i also first thought that the image was somehow floating in the air. The fact that there is a box around it makes this much less interesting.

FYI, Ken Silverman [1] is involved in this project.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_Silverman (he wrote the Build engine, which powers Duke Nukem 3D and other games)

It looks amazing - almost too good to be true. The low lighting in the video make me feel like there is some kind of trickery happening here. I don't find it is surprising that their indiegogo campaign has been started without revealing technical details. It all just makes me a bit suspicious about the technology... I would love to be told otherwise.

It's definitely real. I've seen it, and no doubt so have many many others. As someone else here speculated it's a transparent screen moving up and down over a projector. It's pretty cool and worked in a reasonably light environment.

That doesn't sound as impressive as a thin-air holographic projection.

I suggest you stick with your current thin-air holographic solution if you have one :)

Well, this one literally does it with thin-air:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KfVS-npfVuY

That has minor issues. Such as ozone not being good for you. Ditto, lasers powerful enough to ionize air. Also, the noise created.

Still intriguing though!

Theoretically?

Some gas / dye that emits light (or even just becomes opaque) above a certain level of incident radiation, and two scanning lasers.

But as usual, in theory != in practice. Trying to get something that's safe, won't dissipate too quickly, and isn't opaque...

Air itself would work, but there's this minor matter of "ozone, and lasers powerful enough to ionize air, isn't the best for you".

I wonder if one could stimulate condensation... Though then you'd probably get water on things.

"The device contains a projector that beams an image up onto a screen, which in turn vibrates up and down at a rapid speed."

http://www.extremetech.com/gaming/174772-voxiebox-a-real-lif...

Will from Voxon here. Thanks for the interest. I'm happy to answer your questions if you have any.

Eventually, will this work "out of the box"?

Of course not. But its also not reasonable to expect that.

Does your TV work outside of your TV?

My tv doesn't claim to work outside the tv. This title ("displays 3D images just like R2D2") does.

Still, it is amazing. This is something that makes me feel like I'm living in the future.

My projector does, in some way.

It's not actually a new technique, this. You have a transparent screen (or LEDs or what have you) and move it up and down very quickly, and your persistence of vision makes it look like a single image. Just as a 1D line of dots becomes a 2D image by spinning it (you've all seen those LED fans[0], or heard of John Logie Baird's televisions), so too does a 2D matrix of dots become a 3D image by moving it vertically.

I assume what's new here is that the VoxieBox does a particularly good job of it.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F_1X6M0PqG4

Edit: Here's a YouTube video of another device using a similar technique, except it's layering LED fans!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ey-eO-H2_Mk

If you can show it doing Minecraft you'll get a lot of interest.

Hmm the purple excited me for a second. I spent a while in my twenties and thinking about this, and one of the possibilities I came up with was 2-photon excitation of nitrogen to produce fluorescence - which would be purple. With two lasers you could draw a purple dot at any point in air. No idea if this would work, of course.

Something along those lines has been done successfully (ionising air): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KfVS-npfVuY

I would be interested in reading more details about the technology. How does it work? How much power does it need? What makes manufacturing expensive? Can you make it bigger (holodeck sized)? Does it track the user's head position somehow or does it work for N users simultaneously?

If you look at the images, they look very much like stacked planes. I'm guessing - and it's a guess - that there is some largely-transparent device which can generate light on points on a plane, and that it is being rapidly moved up and down like a piston head, creating a persistence of vision display much like LEDs on a bike wheel.

The low-light conditions the pictures are taken in support that I think - it might be that the "points on a plane" are some kind of florescent plastic and there's a scanning laser underneath drawing on it, so the amount of light being generated at any given point is probably very low.

Concerning the moving piston: Rather than have a moving plane, they could be using stacked, electrically-switchable films. Ones that you can switch from transparent to only translucent (i.e. scattering) very quickly. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_glass)

We did consider that but smart glass is too far slow to turn on and off for it to work.

Bear in mind that this technique can only produce light, not absorb it --- which means no hidden line removal, so it'll be good for wireframe images only, where you can see all sides of the shape at once. That doesn't mean it's not awesomely cool, but it's going to have limited applications.

IIRC, the piston-head technique has been tried before, and has always had the drawback that it's hellishly loud due to air displacement. I wonder how they're getting round this?

A vacuum?

Yup, you've pretty much summed up the underlying principles of how it works, although we're not using a scanning laser.

It works for as many users as you can fit around it, from any angle, including above.

It's a electromechanical device, so getting it to holodeck size may be challenging.

A 3D ~~printer~~ display. Like when we first got display PostScript. Voxels aren't just for programs anymore.

could someone explain why their indiegogo campaign goal is only $500?

An active crowdfunding campaign was required for us to exhibit at the TechCrunch Disrupt expo. It tied in nicely with a popup exhibition we have been talking about doing for a while now.

3D FIFA 2020 multiplayer is going to awesome if they used this!

I'm having one of those SHUT UP AND TAKE MY MONEY moments.

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