RedShark News
The
cinema dream of the hologram promised in Star Wars, Iron Man, and Minority
Report is being chased hard by numerous developers – among them
Lightfield Labs and Leia Inc.
There
are two attributes that, for most people, are at the core of the holographic
dream: floating 3D scenes that groups of people can interact with and not
having to wear AR/VR headgear or 3D glasses.
These
are the guiding principles behind developments at Looking Glass which may just
have a leap on them all.
Co-founder
and CEO Shawn Frayne and his team have been working since 2013 on a technique
that “blends the best of volumetric rendering and light field projection.”
It
has released what it claims is the world’s first interactive light field
development kit – HoloPlayer One.
The
HoloPlayer One uses a two-stage optical system at the heart of which is an LCD
screen that sends 32 views of a given scene towards their designated directions
simultaneously. This creates a field of light, “which a scene that occupies the
same physical volume would have given out”.
The
field of light is then retro-reflected to form a real image outside of the
HoloPlayer One, allowing the scene to literally exist in mid-air.
Looking
Glass says that since the 32 views are “sitting there waiting to be viewed”,
the latency issues commonly experienced in eye-tracking 3D display systems are
eliminated. Being a light field display also makes the HoloPlayer One system
suitable for multiple viewers.
Audiences
within a 50-degree view cone will be able to see the same “aerialised” scene at
the same time without the need for any head-mounted devices.
On
the sensor side, the HoloPlayer One system is equipped with the Intel RealSense
SR300 depth camera. This allows users to interact with the scene by grabbing,
pinching, touching, swiping… just as anyone could do with an actual
object floating in midair.
Except
there is no real object there, just photons.
It’s
available now in a U$750 developer version which works on a PC or MacBook Pro,
but you’ll get better results with a dedicated GPU. There’s also a U$3000
premium edition which includes the Development Edition hardware with a built-in
PC so you can just plug it in and start interacting with holograms, no laptop
needed.
Dozens
of sample applications – ready to download to your HoloPlayer – have been
built, ranging from HoloBrush (kind of like Tiltbrush, but without VR/AR
headgear) to HoloSculpt (a way to sculpt and 3D print a digital piece of
spinning clay) and games like 3D Asteroids. HoloDancer is a kind of impossible
cabinet of curiosities. The system has also been used to rig a 3D digital
character directly in real 3D space and to create experimental 3D ultrasound
imagers and even more experimental versions of a ‘Holocommunicator’ video
programme.
This
could be just the tip of the iceberg of what’s possible with this fundamentally
new interface. There are more experimental applications bubbling up on the
site’s user Forum.
That
said, the HoloPlayer One isn’t a plug-and-play product and is more like the
first generation of personal computers or 3D printers, designed for very early
adopters.
“When
your finger touches, say, the tip of an X-Wing, your finger is actually
coinciding with the digital 3D tip of that X-Wing in real space,” claims
Frayne.
If
you still feel the floating image in HoloPlayer One is a little blurry, the
company is working on something a little crisper. This is an experimental
system called Super Pepper and it’s a close cousin of HoloPlayer One. Unlike
HoloPlayer One, the image does not float above the glass, but behind it so that
it can augment 3D physical objects. The Super Pepper uses a larger 4K
super-stereoscopic screen (similar to what’s in the base of HoloPlayer One but
roughly twice as large) to generate its moving 3D scenes. All software that
runs in Holoplayers can run in the Super Pepper, including the HoloPlay Unity
SDK.
The
company has also innovated a series of displays. Debuted a couple of weeks ago
was a 3-inch thick clear Lucite (acrylic) block that appears to have a 3D
interactive object floating inside of it in front of a black rear panel. The
firm is also preparing an 8.6-inch diagonal and a 15.9-inch diagonal screen for
sale at around U$600 and U$3,000, respectively.
Having
the image float above the glass means you can use your bare hands to interact
directly with the 3D content and feels a step closer to the full dream of the
holographic interface we’ve been promised by decades of sci-fi movies.
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