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One of those brilliant ideas that seems obvious in retrospect. Given that the results are so compelling even when pulled together by hand out of relatively primitive discrete components, I’m wondering why we shouldn’t expect to see full color, high resolution versions from every random 7-letter drop shipper on Amazon next Christmas?
Creative. I probably have the persistence and interest to pull something like this off, but I lack the fantasy to come up with such cool projects. Luckily there's the internet to see what impressive stuff people come up with.
I second taking note of stuff; like most things, genuinely practicing means you will get better.
Something that's also overlooked often is (1) Technical knowledge, (2) Methodical invention (3) Motivation!.
Technical knowledge helps you know which projects are possible (or just economically feasible), and map the roadblocks on the way; impossible inventions are not really useful.
Methodical invention means methodically looking at things instead of just randomly inventing. So you analyze a problem, like: (a) I want to make a volumetric display, (b) I want to bring (virtual) 3D objects to life. Notice the subtle difference between the two. Volumetric displays (a) can range from a lightfield display, which is a very elegant theoretical foundation (and can be realized in a number of ways), to volumetric persistence-of-vision displays like the own shown here. It's likely you will eventually arrive at whatever solutions are possible when you deeply research about a problem domain. Bringing a 3D object to life (b) can mean anything from digital fabrication, VR glasses, haptic interaction, robots, and more. It's a much wider problem domain.
Motivation is also really important. Understanding why you're inventing, and what you what you want to bring to life is also significant. Are you going to bring people joy, is it just very cool, is it a useful medical device that can save lives, etc.. Focusing on worthy subjects is also something you can study and that will really increase how good you are at inventing. Of course making stuff just because [we like it] is also important and valid :)
And for me the most important part is to have fun while you're at it...
holy hell is this guy productive. it is worth scrolling through the various one-off projects he has completed and documented: https://mitxela.com/projects
I would pay $200+ for a bigger (50x50?), rugged, RGB version of this that you can make to display different images without coding.
It's not volumetric, but it's still really cool and may fit your use case https://spinprojector.com/
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wonder if it would be simpler to just spin two phone screens glued back-to-back. You get higher resolution in about the same weight. Bandwidth would be a problem though.
The fundamental problem is refresh rate. If you have two phones that refresh at 240Hz (the fastest I know of), and you want your frame rate to be 12 Hz, you’ll still only be getting 20 refreshes per 180 degree rotation. So your angular resolution will only be 9 degrees. Assuming you use portrait mode, that will make your outermost voxels ~5 mm arcs. And even there, 12 Hz is probably pushing it in terms of flicker.
For a 1 meter diameter and height cylinder at 60Hz voxel refresh and say 1mm resolution at the edge one would need the plane rotating at obviously 3600 rpm, and edge pixels switching at about 380KHz. Since rgb is nice to have that's 10 gigabit for a somewhat coarse display. Nothing impossible, but not a DIY territory yet.
I think one'd want the LEDs either on the receding or the advancing halves of the plate, depending on which is best for the cooling -- not all on the same side or on both -- that would be just a waste.
Or even just on one half of the plate, the other being just a countermass. This way cuts the bandwidth in two.
It seems like this might Work even better with a two sided OLED screen (2 screens back to back) rather than led array, for better resolution? I think that are sufficiently wide angle, at least the monochrome ones.
I think OLEDs might have a refresh rate issue. The nice thing about LEDs is that you can drive them at a very high refresh rate.
It would be hard to manufacture at scale, but what if the LEDs were mid-mounted into a slot cut into the PCB?
compatible with the exact same pick-and-place machines, you just need to drill a hole in the PCB
I wonder if a cheap oled display could be updated fast enough to achieve a much higher resolution. It might work but could look worse since the space between radial slices would be much larger than the pitch of the pixels, most likely.
Here's another cool one I found a while ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wM_Byrv9iBI
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not volumetric, but it's still really cool and may fit your use case https://spinprojector.com/
Only place I've seen these before is at the Atlanta airport, where they use them to show a 3d-animated sign to remind you not to bring your gun through the security checkpoint.