Researchers Develop 3-D Phone Technology ("hologram")

[Dover]

Researchers Develop 3-D Phone Technology

Wed Nov 24, 1:40 PM ET Science - AP
Picture - ?0.18266731070476272



TOKYO - It's an idea that was popularized by Princess Leia's plea for help in Star Wars: sending a 3-D hologram. Now, two Japanese scientists have developed technology they hope will one day turn the humble telephone booth into a high-tech chamber for beaming holographic images.

At a Tokyo University laboratory, a woman stands inside a booth where a 360-degree digital camera surrounding her face sends data to a cylindrical tube. Soon, she appears to be staring out from the tube. Viewed from the side, only the side of her head is visible. Go round to the back, and only her hair can be seen.

"We can see the 3-D image as if it's inside the cylinder," said Susumu Tachi, a Tokyo University professor of computer science and physics, in a demonstration Wednesday for The Associated Press. With the device, "we can have a family gathering or conference at a remote place."

Tachi and Tomohiro Endo developed the cylinder — dubbed SeeLinder — by combining fiber optics, electronics and white light-emitting diodes, or LEDs.

The hologram cylinder resembles a zoetrope, a primitive motion-picture wheel....cont'd

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=624&ncid=738&e=2&u=/ap/20041124/ap_on_sc/japan_hologram_phone

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O Hologram, Where Art Thou?

Why holograms look so cool in the movies—and so lame in real life.

By Paul Boutin
Updated Thursday, Dec. 2, 2004, at 4:13 PM PT



Ever since I saw a 1-foot-high holographic Carrie Fisher plead, "Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi," I've been waiting for a 3-D video player to call my own. I'm not talking about fake, View-Master-style 3-D that lets you look at an image from only one angle—you can already get that on a $3,000 laptop. That "360-degree hologram phone" you read about last week? It's not even a real hologram, just a stereoscope that's 3-D from left to right, not up and down. Impressive? Sure. A video hologram that lets you check out your subject from front to back and top to bottom? Not even close. And why would anyone want to call me on my hologram phone if they can't stand on their tiptoes and check out my bald spot?

Sci-fi movies and TV shows do a great job of visualizing our holographic future because holograms are way easier to fake than to make. Step one: Hire an actor to play the hologram. Step two: Make him look kind of blurry. Along with Princess Leia, some pioneering examples of the actor-as-hologram technique are Rimmer from the 1980s BBC space comedy Red Dwarf, Orlando Jones' holographic librarian from 2002's The Time Machine, and Star Trek's recreational holodeck.

Real-life holographic gadgets are always getting our hopes up—and then letting us down—for a good reason. Unlike the teleporter and the faster-than-light spaceship, hologram technology is grounded in real science—it's just taking longer to bloom than anyone expected. Holographic photography was invented in 1947. Stephen Benton, one of the format's pioneers, started working on a holographic television for Polaroid in the 1960s. But it wasn't until MasterCard started putting holograms on credit cards in 1983—to deter counterfeiters and because they looked really cool—that the rainbow-tinged pictures crossed over from scientific marvel to cheesy pop-culture fad. Remember the special hologram covers on National Geographic and Sports Illustrated? What about that store in the mall that sold pricey holographic photos of animal heads and jutting faucets?...cont'd

http://slate.msn.com/id/2110446/

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How to create a HOLOGRAM -
http://www.holophile.com/about.htm