Another areas we looked into for retail engagement. Seen many test examples but each had considerable limitations. Are we finally approaching clear possibilities for high resolution and interaction and screen orientation? And what will this imply for VR/AR applications? Good detail view of the challenges and progress being made. Disney involvement also interesting.
Floating Voxels Provide New Hope for 3D Displays By Chris Edwards
Communications of the ACM, October 2018, Vol. 61 No. 10, Pages 11-13 10.1145/3264625
Few movie scenes have had such an effect on display-technology research and development as the droid R2D2 projecting a three-dimensional (3D) image of Princess Leia pleading for help in 1977's block-buster film Star Wars. Numerous engineers have wondered just how they might achieve that effect, of an image you can see from any angle, in real life. Even The Walt Disney Company, which bought Lucasfilm and the distribution rights for the movie franchise in 2012, is among those with engineers working on the idea.
Two years ago, Daniel Joseph and colleagues in entertainment giant Disney's Burbank, CA-based research and development operation filed for a patent on a projector intended to display floating 3D images. The U.S. patent points to an anticipated implementation of having the 3D image seem to be standing on an illuminated pedestal, similar to the game table on the Millennium Falcon that appears in a scene later in Star Wars.
The Disney system suffers from a problem that is shared with similar systems: the image is formed from an array of light sources fed through beam splitters and mirrors some distance behind the pedestal, which limits the viewing angle to those looking toward the projection optics, and so cannot emulate the movies.
Daniel Smalley, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at Brigham Young University, says, "Like many in the holography field, I felt that holograms would provide the 3D images of the future, but the annoying issue is you have to be looking in the direction of the screen that generates them. It's counter to what you expect 3D displays to do in the future." .... "
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