Lifeboat Foundation

A piece of science fiction technology could be one step closer to reality with a new development in haptic holograms.

The idea of haptic, or touchable, holograms is familiar to millions from its appearance in sci-fi favorites like Star Trek’s holodeck, where characters can interact with solid-seeming computer simulations of people, objects and places.

Now, a team of engineers from the University of Glasgow have developed a new way to create the sensation of physically interacting with holographic projections.

An acoustic tractor beam that can bend sound around an obstacle to levitate an object on the other side has been created by researchers in the UK. Dubbed SoundBender, the device combines an ultrasound transducer array with an acoustic metamaterial.

In recent years, researchers have used transducer arrays to build sonic tractor beams that can create complex acoustic holograms to manipulate objects in mid-air. Acoustic metamaterials are engineered materials with structural properties that do not usually occur naturally. They have been used to produce acoustic holograms, bend beams of sound and create static acoustic levitation devices. But the team behind the SoundBender, based at the University of Sussex, say that these technologies have key limitations.

Continue reading “Acoustic Tractor Beam Can Grab Objects From Behind Obstacles” »

Despite years of hype, virtual reality headsets have yet to topple TV or computer screens as the go-to devices for video viewing.

One reason: VR can make users feel sick. Nausea and eye strain can result because VR creates an illusion of 3D viewing although the user is in fact staring at a fixed-distance 2D display. The solution for better 3D visualization could lie in a 60-year-old technology remade for the digital world: holograms.

Continue reading “MIT artificial intelligence tech can generate 3D holograms in real-time” »

They may be tiny weapons, but Brigham Young University’s holography research group has figured out how to create lightsabers—green for Yoda and red for Darth Vader, naturally—with actual luminous beams rising from them.

Inspired by the displays of science fiction, the researchers have also engineered battles between equally small versions of the Starship Enterprise and a Klingon Battle Cruiser that incorporate photon torpedoes launching and striking the enemy vessel that you can see with the naked eye.

Continue reading “Hologram experts can now create real-life images that move in the air” »

Researchers from Utah have figured out how to use lasers to create sci-fi-style holograms inspired by phasers from ‘Star Trek’ and lightsabers from ‘Star Wars.’

Researchers have discovered the most precise way to control individual ions using holographic optical engineering technology.

The new technology uses the first known holographic optical engineering device to control trapped ion qubits. This technology promises to help create more precise controls of qubits that will aid the development of quantum industry-specific hardware to further new quantum simulation experiments and potentially quantum error correction processes for trapped ion qubits.

“Our algorithm calculates the hologram’s profile and removes any aberrations from the light, which lets us develop a highly precise technique for programming ions,” says lead author Chung-You Shih, a Ph.D. student at the University of Waterloo’s Institute for Quantum Computing (IQC).

Researchers have used a quantum mechanical property to overcome some of the limitations of conventional holograms. The new approach, detailed in Nature Physics, employed quantum entanglement, allowing two photons to become a single “non-local particle.” A series of entangled photon pairs is key to producing new and improved holograms.

Classical holograms work by using a single light beam split into two. One beam is sent towards the object you’re recreating and is reflected onto a special camera. The second beam is sent directly onto the camera. By measuring the differences in light, its phase, you can reconstruct a 3D image. A key property in this is the wave’s coherence.

The quantum hologram shares some of these principles but its execution is very different. It starts by splitting a laser beam in two, but these two beams will not be reunited. The key is in the splitting. As you can see in the image below, the blue laser hits a nonlinear crystal, which creates two beams made of pairs of entangled photons.

Huaqiangbei, the world’s largest electronics wholesale market area in the Chinese technology hub of Shenzhen, has become the latest Wonderland for geeks, the way Tokyo’s Akihabara was to otaku during the tech bubble at the turn of the millennium. Amid the warren of closet-sized shops and makeshift stalls, the latest catalogue of smartphones, LED lights, holograms, electronic parts and every type of gadget imaginable compete for attention and the spending yuan of consumers.

Shenzhen has become an international hotspot for the unmanned aerial vehicle industry, following the global success of drone giant DJI.

Researchers from Tokyo Metropolitan University have devised and implemented a simplified algorithm for turning freely drawn lines into holograms on a standard desktop CPU. They dramatically cut down the computational cost and power consumption of algorithms that require dedicated hardware. It is fast enough to convert writing into lines in real time, and makes crisp, clear images that meet industry standards. Potential applications include hand-written remote instructions superimposed on landscapes and workbenches.

T potential applications of holography include important enhancements to vital, practical tasks, including remote instructions for surgical procedures, electronic assembly on circuit boards, or directions projected on landscapes for navigation. Making holograms available in a wide range of settings is vital to bringing this technology out of the lab and into daily life.

One of the major drawbacks of this state-of-the-art technology is the computational load of hologram generation. The kind of quality we’ve come to expect in our 2D displays is prohibitive in 3D, requiring supercomputing levels of number crunching to achieve. There is also the issue of power consumption. More widely available hardware like GPUs in gaming rigs might be able to overcome some of these issues with raw power, but the amount of electricity they use is a major impediment to mobile applications. Despite improvements to available hardware, the solution can’t be achieved by brute force.