41–50 of 59 posts
Despite them doing their best to cover it up with quick editing and cherry picked angles, it's clear this has very low depth resolution and foggy picture quality. If this only uses light, how would it deal with occlusion? It would be impossible to put a dark object in front of a lighter one, right?
"people of all ages can come together to experience something that’s future AF."
Is the target audience "gullible ass"?
Despite them doing their best to cover it up with quick editing and cherry picked angles, it's clear this has very low depth resolution and foggy picture quality. If this only uses light, how would it deal with occlusion? It would be impossible to put a dark object in front of a lighter one, right?
It definitely seems like just something cool to have sitting around at this stage, like a lava lamp or something.
As long as they can keep improving the res, it could eventually be useful, but will they get there before unobtrusive AR glasses?
The description is rather vague. It claims 2 million voxels and no moving parts. That's resolution of maybe 200 x 200 x 50; the depth dimension seems smaller than the others. Is is some optical system which projects on 50 plates (maybe less), or something like that? It looks like they're somehow optically remapping a projector to multiple planes at lower resolution. There have been depth displays before - vibrating m…
They say it's not a parlor trick, but it's nowhere near true holography or anything like it. True holography records the object's wavefront as a flat interference pattern, encoding the phase information from the object (and also creating a very precise model of its surface), creating a diffraction grating which can then be used to replay the identical wave when illuminated by a suitable reference source of light. Thi…
Someday someone may make a display with light-wavelength-scale resolution and display real holograms in real time, but that hasn't been done yet.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Looks like that has about 20 layers. The flickering suggests a mechanical scanner. A rotating mirror? Vibrating mirror?
I think it's a spinning plane with a projector beneath. Their limitation is in the DLP projector's refresh rate. Seems they also may have extra limitations in colour space, since most DLP projectors use a rotating colour wheel.
I'm really curious if they opted for a display or a projector. A display is heavy but it might be possible if they use a vacuum. A projection surface on the other hand can be very light but you have to calibrate the optics and it _has_ to have a display and not a DLP chip, etc.. it's a really interesting problem to solve.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It looks like multiple such displays stacked up, for true depth. Each of your eyes will see a slightly different image because it has real parallax, and each person around a display will see from a different angle too.
"Multiple pepper's ghost displays stacked up" doesn't really make sense. Pepper's ghost requires a lot of space, and it isn't really stackable.
Despite them doing their best to cover it up with quick editing and cherry picked angles, it's clear this has very low depth resolution and foggy picture quality. If this only uses light, how would it deal with occlusion? It would be impossible to put a dark object in front of a lighter one, right?
As far as resolution: each slice is about 104px high resolution in it's current state, the width is about 1500px in resolution. The current depth resolution is 10. Because Volume currently has 10 slices. We do use some tricks to reduce the apparently low depth resolution, for example we allow a dev to set settings to 'overdraw' the slice so slices draw parts of their sister slices, which are then blended/interpolated with shaders. It helps a lot, and in fact our tests with more slices don't seem to do much other than increase the quality and viability of wider viewing angles. At near straight on viewing angles (within 15 degrees of the center), more slices don't seem to affect the quality of the display much (interestingly).
As an additive display, you are correct, a dim object in front of a light one wont show well... it really does look a lot like 'princess leia' in the 'obi-wan come help me' scene.
There are 2 ways we found to mitigate this. 1) We allow devs to set a 'black point' which adds the desired value to all geometry, thereby having a way to distinguish 'black' from 'void'. 2) Certain applications benefit a lot from not rendering slices at all but drawing everything as a normal 3D scene and then using a shader reading the depth buffer to determine the slice of a particular pixel - hence anything in front of something else causes a 'shadow' in subsequent slices (so it -CAN- occlude in this way, but by sacrificing the view from the back side). Things like scanned human heads look very good with this method... they honestly look like ghost heads suspended in space inside Volume.
Anyway, I hope it answers your questions. (I am the main tools dev).
I'll start by saying this is a really interesting device, and a very impressive technological feat. However, I have some major criticisms too: The only advantage I see to this vs. something like HoloLens is that it doesn't require a head mounted display. Unfortunately for this project, that's not as big a barrier for serious companies as they need it to be. In time I think this "advantage" will also dwindle due to sh…
Full disclosure, I'm working with the company right now. I made the Unity Asset Tutorial Video as well as the rhythm game Rhythm Reach (and am currently taking a break from prepping for our launch party).
Also, take what I'm going to say w/ a grain of salt as I've been working in Volumetrics on and off for nearly 10 years with my personal project Lumarca: http://www.albert-hwang.com/lumarca/ -- so I've been drinking the Koolaid for a while now...
Volumetric Tech is a completely different medium, full of it's pros and cons. Many of the things people are bringing up in this thread are totally true and often infuriating when you start working in this space. You get x-ray vision (for better or for worse). It's impossible to meaningfully document (video always smashes it back into 2d). A focus on voxels make traditionally 2d content a weird problem (like text). And, to be sure, supportive tech for this isn't nearly as advanced as the stuff supporting VR. In terms of engineering, this creates a tough balancing act between price, visual fidelity, and scalability.
So -- why do it?
I do it because it's the only form of digital 3d media that exhibits passive physical presence. It's viscerally present in a way that no other digital media is. When people see a truly volumetric display for the first time (in person), 90% of the time they're totally floored. This is true even of my other volumetric display that had much much worse visual fidelity. The content is "worldlocked" in a very real way.
You also bring up the very real problem of practical applications. We're also exploring these questions (medical visualization w/ DICOM integration, songrams, games?). While this display is far from perfect, we're hoping that the low barrier to entry (a little $ + Unity) + some community presence, we'll make the environment friendlier for finding those solutions.
Anyhow, if you (or anybody on this thread) visits the NYC area, please drop us a note to come by to see it for yourself in person!
They say it's not a parlor trick, but it's nowhere near true holography or anything like it. True holography records the object's wavefront as a flat interference pattern, encoding the phase information from the object (and also creating a very precise model of its surface), creating a diffraction grating which can then be used to replay the identical wave when illuminated by a suitable reference source of light. Thi…
There's a small company in Austin, Zebra Imaging, which generates CG holograms on big pieces of photographic film.[1] Those are real holograms. The military buys them as 3D models in a flat, portable form, and they're sometimes used in place of architectural models. Some people still take photographic holograms using a big flash laser. (This was a thing about 40 years ago. One guy still does it.) Almost everything el…