Hello, Holographic Video!

April 26, 2007

It's hard to believe, but that nifty new flat-panel monitor you just shelled out a small fortune for will someday be a dust-covered relic. Your children or grandchildren may one day plug it in and gasp in awe at how primitive it is: It only displays in two dimensions!

You can't fight the future. According to this article in the MIT Technology Review, affordable holographic video displays, powered by existing computer hardware, are right around the corner. Let's take a look at the possibilities:


According to the article, "A holographic video display could provide another way to view medical images such as MRIs and CT scans, as well as sets of complex, multidimensional data and designs for furniture and cars..." Theoretically such an innovation would revolutionize medicine or industrial design. But you and I all know what the technology is REALLY for: Games and porn.

Projecting holographic video (a technology that involves broadcasting light rays that interfere with each other in a specific diffraction pattern that matches the outline of a 3D object) is tricky stuff. Previous generations of the hardware were as big as a dining room table, not to mention expensive. But the "Mark III" holographic video projector, expected to be finished within the next couple of months at an MIT research lab, uses off-the-shelf computer and telecommunications technology to render 3D images at an expected cost of just a couple hundred dollars. Turns out that those state-of-the-art 3D cards we use for videogames have no problem calculating holograms with ease. And your family told you you were wasting your money!

Of course I won't be rushing out to buy such a display for Soul Calibur throwdowns anytime soon -- the Mark III projects a 3D image on a foggy piece of glass roughly the size of a Rubik's cube. Not exactly the perfect venue for admiring state of the art boob-jiggling technology. But it's a start, friends. It's a start.

      -Fargo

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