Collaborate Disseminate
Hackers from all over Europe descended upon Rome last weekend for the Maker Faire that calls itself the “European Edition”. This three-day event is one of the largest Maker Faires in the world — they had 27,000 school students from all over Italy and Europe attend on Friday alone.
This …read more
We are all familiar with the idea of a hologram, either from the monochromatic laser holographic images you’ll find on your bank card or from fictional depictions such as Princes Leia’s distress message from Star Wars. And we’ve probably read about how the laser holograms work with a split beam of coherent light recombined to fall upon a photographic plate. They require no special glasses or headsets and possess both stereoscopic and spatial 3D rendering, in that you can view both the 3D Princess Leia and your bank’s logo or whatever is on your card as 3D objects from …read more
Continue reading Supercon: Alex Hornstein’s Adventures In Hacking The Lightfield
Prior to this weekend I had assumed making holograms to be beyond the average hacker’s reach, either in skill or treasure. I was proven wrong by a Club-Mate box full of electronics, and an acrylic jig perched atop an automotive inner tube. At the Hope Conference, Tommy Johnson was sharing his hacker holography in a workshop that let a few lucky attendees make their own holograms on site!
The technique used here depends on interference patterns rather than beam splitting. A diffused laser beam is projected through holographic film onto the subject of the hologram — say a bouquet of …read more
[Dr. Roel Vertegaal] has led a team of collaborators from [Queen’s University] to build TeleHuman 2 — a telepresence setup that aims to project your actual-size likeness in 3D.
Developed primarily for business videoconferencing, the setup requires a bit of space on both ends of the call. A ring of stereoscopic z-cameras capture the subject from all angles which the corresponding projector on the other end displays. Those projectors are arranged in similar halo above a human-sized, retro-reflective cylindrical screen which can be walked around — viewing the image from any angle without a VR headset or glasses — in …read more
Continue reading A Telepresence System That’s Starting To Feel Like A Holodeck
If you’ve ever been to a local fair or amusement park, chances are you’ve seen an illusion known as Pepper’s Ghost. To perform the illusion, essentially all that’s needed is a thin sheet of plastic or one-way mirror and a light source. Get it right, and you’ll have apparitions popping up in all kinds of interesting places. With just the right software, though, one of those places could be in your own 3D display.
Using just a tablet and a sheet of plastic rolled into a cone, a three-person team was able to create a 3D display using the Pepper’s …read more
In July we reported on the launch of the Hologram developer program that offered a free SIM card and a small amount of monthly cellular data for those who wanted to build connectivity into their prototypes. Today, Hologram has launched some new hardware to go along with that program.
Nova is a cellular modem in a USB thumb drive form factor. It ships in a little box with a PCB that hosts the u-blox cellular module, two different antennas, a plastic enclosure, and a SIM card. The product is aimed at those building connected devices around single-board computers, making it …read more
Continue reading Review: New 3G and Cat-M1 Cellular Hardware from Hologram
In July we reported on the launch of the Hologram developer program that offered a free SIM card and a small amount of monthly cellular data for those who wanted to build connectivity into their prototypes. Today, Hologram has launched some new hardware to go along with that program.
Nova is a cellular modem in a USB thumb drive form factor. It ships in a little box with a PCB that hosts the u-blox cellular module, two different antennas, a plastic enclosure, and a SIM card. The product is aimed at those building connected devices around single-board computers, making it …read more
Continue reading Review: New 3G and Cat-M1 Cellular Hardware from Hologram
Part lightshow, part art piece, part exploratory technology, Light Barrier (third edition) by South Korean duo [Kimchi and Chips] crafts a visual and aural experience of ephemeral light structures using projectors, mirrors, and a light fog.
Presently installed at the ACT Center of Asia Culture Complex in Gwangju, South Korea, Light Barrier co-ordinates eight projectors, directing their light onto a concave cluster of 630 mirrors. As a result, an astounding 16 million ‘pixel beams’ of refocused light simulate shapes above the array. The array itself was designed in simulation using an algorithm which — with subtle adjustments to each mirror …read more
Continue reading Shapes Made From Light, Smoke, and A Lot of Mirrors
Any time anyone finds a cool way to display in 3D — is there an uncool way? — we’re on board. Instructables user [Gelstronic]’s method involves an array of spinning props to play the game Snake in 3D.
The helix display consists of twelve props, precisely spaced and angled using 3D-printed parts, each with twelve individually addressable LEDs. Four control groups of 36 LEDs are controlled by the P8XBlade2 propeller microcontroller, and the resultant 17280 voxels per rotation are plenty to produce an identifiable image.
In order to power the LEDs, [Gelstronic] used wireless charging coils normally used for cell …read more
Continue reading Helix Display Brings Snake Into Three Dimensions
We’ve seen the 3D phone fad come and go, with devices like the Evo 3D, that used a parallax barrier to achieve autostereoscopy (that is, 3D viewing without glasses). These displays aren’t holograms, they are just showing your eyes two different images like a 3D movie or a stereopticon. However, researchers from Australia and China are hoping to change that. They’ve developed a nano-hologram (their term) that is about 1000 times thinner than a human hair. You can see a video about the invention, below.
Conventional holograms modulate the phase of light to give the illusion of three-dimensional depth. But …read more
