Samsung Patent Describes Holographic TV Technology (consumerist.com) 52
Patently Mobile is reporting about a new patent application filed by Samsung that lays out new holographic TV technology. Slashdot reader Rick Schumann writes via Consumerist: Holographic displays as described by Samsung would be able to make the depth the brain perceives consistent with the focus of the eyes. Lasers would be used to project holograms that float in front of the screen, which of course sounds a heck of a lot like a mini Princess Leia telling Obi-Wan Kenobi he's her only hope. The display apparatus could also include an eye tracking unit that would locate an observer's pupils and adjust how far it has to project the holographic image for optimum viewing.
Worth noting: This is just a patent application; no indication of even a working prototype.
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Why not just get a date .... oh, sorry, I forgot, this is Slashdot!
And you might go to jail if you touch real boobies!
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the flames are so real I can feel them.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haptic_technology#Ultrahaptics [wikipedia.org]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2QkbVr4J7CM [youtube.com]
http://www.ultrahaptics.com/ [ultrahaptics.com]
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how does this wrok (Score:4)
I've actually seen these devices in action a decade ago (at Darpa Tech) and it's stunning. but I never understood how they worked. Yes I understand the hologram part of this. The two things I don't understand are
1) I would think that the pitch of the spatial light modulator elements has to be much finer than the wavelength of light. Yet the surface on which these operate are enormous which would mean length/pitch would be an insane number of controllable pixels.
2) The ones I saw were black and white. Not black and green or black and red. So how are they getting the "white" part if this. lasers are monochormatic. There are white light holograms but if I recall correctly these usually give up one axis of holographic dispersion to make the other axis multi-color. and even then they usually are haloed with fringing rainbows (like the Visa card Dove).
So how do they pull off these two tricks?
Great... (Score:3)
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You could look up the patent application on your phone and it will Burn After Reading [wikipedia.org].
Which is, coincidentally, the UK government's plan for Birmingham should the US invade.
"Just" A Patent Application? (Score:5, Informative)
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They'll work. They'll do something totally useless. Utility isn't a condition.
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Does anyone have a link to the actual patent application? The summary on the linked blog pretty much gives no details about the specifics of the patent (i.e., pretty much any design for a holographic display would have the components listed in the summary of the patent given by the blog) The big elephants in the room are: (1) how do you build a spatial light modulator that has micron-size pixels and yet be big enough to comfortably view a big image, and (2) how do you compute in real time what values thos
Eye tracking.. (Score:4, Informative)
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I don't understand why eye tracking is necessary at all. In a pre-digital physics class (late '70s) we had holograms. They consisted of photographic film with moire patterns. They needed no eye tracking, and in fact that tech came decades later.
Oh, wait--I just figured it out. The eye tracking is to make sure what you're seeing is what they want you to see. With a film hologram, it's like looking out a window. The eye tracking keeps you at the middle of the window. So this will likely be not for large TVs,
Lets hope it does not explode (Score:1)
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Anecdotal evidence is... anecdotal. At work we had Apple laptop (pre Intel one), with exploded battery (torn aluminium looked scary)
Meh... (Score:5, Funny)
Crooked Leia, storing classified information in a private server... did you know that she's still under investigation by the empire for doing so?
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The farce is with you, master Rei.
Love it (Score:1)
Sounds interesting. (Score:3)
Sounds interesting but unless the price point was the same as a regular HDTV or close, I'm not going to feel any need to spend the extra on one. I don't really see much point in 2K or 4K or 3D sets. I'm sure they're great, and if they're the same price as a regular HD set (or just a little more) I might spring for it, but if they're $100+ more than an HD set- meh. I'm fine with slightly older TV technology thanks!
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Yeah! I prefer when they try appeal to small audiences or use more offensive words. Damn journalists using non-offensive but casual language.
boring and not holographic (Score:2)
This is boring technology, even the lady in the patent isn't impressed with it! [wordpress.com]
Anyway, what the "Eye Tracking Unit" indicates is that this isn't actually a hologram but rather more tomfoolery of giving your eyes two different images. The problem with this is it won't look 3D when more than one person is looking at it.
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It may suggest they've figured out a way to efficiently compute the wavefront using eye tracking as a simplifying assumption. That could be useful since, rather than running into difficulty as the number of viewers increases, the technology would approach true holographic projection as the number of eyes tracked and computational power was increased.
Terrible article (Score:3)
I haven't seen the patent claims, but from what I see in the article I can't say that there's anything novel there. The article is absolutely terrible as a report on a patent, with it being obvious that the author knows nothing about what he writes, either about patents or technology. For example, there is no mention of the patent claims, no mention of similar technology and an unsupported claim that the device is revolutionary.
Eye tracking problem? (Score:2)
If a system uses eye tracking to decide how to display something, doesn't that mean it's necessarily limited to a single user experience?
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Don't think so. It still uses the underlying display technology of a holographic display so in theory the display technology should have the ability to fully reconstruct the light field. The problem with this approach is it is computationally very expensive to compute the wavefront. Hopefully, the eye tracking is just to simplify this computational task and one could just track as many eyes as computational power allowed.
not so new, still needs magic to work (Score:1)
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It's not the SLM so much as the computational power needed to feed it. The SLMs seem to exist https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
As for computation...that's hard but maybe you could just precompute it for video
I think Samsung is just patent trolling (Score:1)
Anyone Know What Actualy Novelty Is Claimed? (Score:2)
The descriptions of the patent all seem to just describe a standard holographic display (look on wikipedia). You have a light source, a screen that either affects the amplitude or phase of the light, and then some lenses to properly display that light.
It was my understanding that the hard part has always been doing the light calculations in real time. Going from a 3D description of a scene to the wavefront passing through the screen isn't trivial.