Lifeboat Foundation

On the first day of a popular psychology course in the 1970s at City College of New York, students were told the story of how a remote South American tribe that was never exposed to technology or even electricity reacted when they saw a cowboy program on TV for the first time. Panic-stricken viewers dodged out of the way as galloping horses disappeared at the edge of the screen, while others searched high and low to find the missing animals. These were old, bulky televisions with scrappy black-and-white displays. But to the tribe members, the images were chillingly real.

One wonders how those folks—not to mention modern-day tech geeks as well as the general public—would react to a portable projector that fits in the palm of your hand and is capable of displaying stunningly realistic 3D color holographic images. Chances are they’d be pretty impressed.

Looking Glass Factory, a Brooklyn-based tech firm, is set to offer an 8 holographic display called Portrait that will convert users’ favorite personal photos into lifelike holograms. No special equipment or skills are required. Users simply take regular 2-D photos with any device, ranging from sophisticated DSLR setups to low-end cellphones—even old family Polaroids should work—and send them to Looking Glass Factory’s cloud-based service.

Dan Lovy

Holograms have been around for decades now, but more as a novelty than a crucial technology that everyone uses. PORTL thinks it can change that.

Interactive 3D images that appear to float in the air, above a table that a group of people can stand around without needing any special headsets or glasses: that’s what South Australian company Voxon Photonics has built with its US$10,000 VX1 table.

Fiction has promised us holograms for decades, with one of the most famous examples appearing in 1977’s Star Wars: A New Hope. On board the Millennium Falcon, R2D2 and Chewbacca play some sort of digital board game, interacting with figures built out of light hovering in the air above a table.

Such things have been a long time coming to the real world. VR and AR can both somewhat replicate the experience, but they require headsets. In the best case, these are a bit antisocial, stopping you from looking others in the eye. In the worst case, they completely remove the wearer from the real world to immerse them in virtual space.

Holographic displays that are both compact and produce realistic holograms without eyestrain are still difficult to realize. Here the authors implement a steering-backlight unit and a holographic video processor to produce a realistic holographic display in a slim panel.

Right now it looks like the graphics from Nintendo’s Virtual Boy, but the engineers want to add full color.

Shrinking Down

In a bid to sell more than “several dozen” models, the company is now working on a more accessible, miniature version that records and transmits holograms without taking up the entire height of a room. And, company founder David Nussbaum tells TechCrunch, it comes with new subscription features.

Continue reading “This ‘Portal’ Lets You Beam a Hologram of Yourself Into Video Calls” »

Base Hologram has made its mission clear: create premium holographic shows. But will the ethical questions surrounding holograms keep it from success?

Intensity shot noise in digital holograms distorts the quality of the phase images after phase retrieval, limiting the usefulness of quantitative phase microscopy (QPM) systems in long term live cell imaging. In this paper, we devise a hologram-to-hologram neural network, Holo-UNet, that restores high quality digital holograms under high shot noise conditions (sub-mW/cm2 intensities) at high acquisition rates (sub-milliseconds). In comparison to current phase recovery methods, Holo-UNet denoises the recorded hologram, and so prevents shot noise from propagating through the phase retrieval step that in turn adversely affects phase and intensity images. Holo-UNet was tested on 2 independent QPM systems without any adjustment to the hardware setting. In both cases, Holo-UNet outperformed existing phase recovery and block-matching techniques by ∼ 1.8 folds in phase fidelity as measured by SSIM. Holo-UNet is immediately applicable to a wide range of other high-speed interferometric phase imaging techniques. The network paves the way towards the expansion of high-speed low light QPM biological imaging with minimal dependence on hardware constraints.

Motion sensors make avatars dance, via Mark Bartkevitch. Some new technologies about holograms you find here: “A Hologram of Anyone Speaking Any Language” (1 year ago): https://www.facebook.com/EngineeringML/videos/84898885213961…__tn__=K-R and https://bit.ly/308uV3h.