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Question of the Day: Was CNN's Hologram Stupid or Cool?
Posted by Sean Fallon at 7:00 AM on November 6, 2008
If you tuned into CNN's election coverage last night, you probably saw their new fangled hologram technology being used to pull up data and conduct interviews. Sure, it was a gimmick-and-a-half—but it was interesting at least. Plus, as far as I could tell, the complicated system was pretty much glitch-free (Fox News, on the other hand, seemed to have problems with their basic touchscreen system all night). But my question is: was was it stupid or cool?
The US Army is ramping up the development of technology that previously could have been classified as X-Files, "making science fiction into reality" as Dr. John Parmentola, Director of their Research and Laboratory Management. The list of things currently in the works is amazing: regenerating body parts on "nano-scaffolding", telepathy through electronic impulses in the scalp, and self-aware virtual photorealistic soldiers that can be deployed in the battlefield through "quantum ghost imaging". To test these they want to use them into a massively multi-player online games like World of Warcraft or Eve online:
Holy crap, the future is here, and I'm not talking about the next president being elected tonight. CNN's election night talking heads won't be yapping against a boring green screen. No sir, they will be 3D holograms beamed into the studio next to Wolf Blitzer, making it seem as if they are actually there. While it's not surprising that bringing this bit of sci-fi magic to the more mundane arena of guys with large heads huffing and puffing about politics and numbers is an impressive technical feat, it's kind of amazing just how much comes together to make it happen.
We don't know the last time that a demo kiosk has actually caused us to look twice, but if a place like Best Buy or Fry's were filled with Dreamoc 3D displays, we'd probably be more interested in the sales pitch than the product. Because not only can the system display 3D video—it can display 3D video that mixes with real world objects. In other words, the Dreamoc can make it look like your phone has holograms shooting out of the screen:
Holographic television sets may be only a few years off thanks to a new breakthrough in 3D technology. Researchers at the University of Arizona said they had made the first updatable 3D displays with memory, a prerequisite for getting any holographic image to move. With the new technology, displays can now be erased and rewritten in a matter of minutes.
Researchers at the University of Tokyo have demonstrated a device that can create touchable, creepily invisible floating "objects" using focused ultrasound waves. Though the technology is early testing stages, its designers have already expressed an interest in weaponi- I mean, commercialising it for possible use in gaming and design applications. For now, the team has only been able to simulate resistance in one direction, but say that forming complex shapes and textures is plausible.
3-D images? Peshaw. Those are so 2007. What humanity needs now is what MIT researchers hope to provide very soon: super realistic "passive 6-D reflectance field displays" that not only look great, but also respond to stimuli, like lighting conditions. And, not only will these uber images do all that and a bag of chips, they'll be able to change over time as lighting conditions change, with "no electronics or active control" from we mere humans. Oh, and the displays will respond the changes in viewpoint, meaning these visual wonders will have a creepy degree of interactivity to them too (read: legitimate holograms).
