3D Star Wars videophones are becoming a reality

Andrew Jones from the Institute of Creative Technologies of the University of Southern California ( USC Institute for Creative Technologies ) and his colleagues showed an unusual display at SIGGRAPH 2007.

This thing demonstrates a completely three-dimensional graphics, which looks "right" from any point of view, without any "dead zones".

At the heart of the “360-degree interactive light field display” ( Interactive 360-Degree Light Field Display ), this is the full name of the invention, is a rapidly rotating tilting mirror covered with a kind of “holographic lens”. The image itself is created by an ordinary projector (slightly “overclocked”) fixed above the mirror.


The mirror rotates continuously and at each turn forms about three hundred hundreds of pictures, sending each to the viewing area with a width of only 1.25 degrees. The rate of rotation of the mirror should be 20 revolutions per second, so that the viewer from any position will always see all 20 “basic” frames of this truly volumetric video. At the same time, it was necessary to “overclock” the projector so that it would give up to 5760 frames per second (288 × 20)!
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In this case, the system can either show a pre-generated video, or act as an interactive display, with which the user can arbitrarily rotate the observed object with a mouse or joystick along all three axes.


Source: Membrana