Let’s start a thread about Sci Fi stuff that are getting real.
I am very excited with the news that holographic displays are closer to reality. I hate those ridiculous stereoscopic glasses, that are nothing more than 19th century’s high tech :D. Nope. The way to go is the holographic screen… or at least “pseudo” holographic screen.
Was anyone in the '40s predicting holographic displays? I don’t recall seeing them any earlier than in Minority Report - the movie, not the book. I’m sure they’re not original to that film, but I was under the impression that they were a fairly recent concept.
In literature the concept of holograms goes bask to the early 60s at least. In terms of movies, they play a fairly major role in “StarWars”, and that was '77.
Some earlier references to 3D screens and similar systems.
Abruptly I was aroused from my musings by the sharp ringing of a bell at my elbow. “The telestereo,” I said to Hal Kur. “Take the controls.” As he did so I stepped over to the telestereo’s glass disk, inset in the room’s floor, and touched a switch beside it. Instantly there appeared standing upon the disk, the image of a man in the blue and white robe of the Supreme Council, a lifesize and moving and stereoscopically perfect image, flashed across the void of space to my apparatus by means of etheric vibrations. Through the medium of that projected image the man himself could see and hear me as well as I could see and hear him, and at once he spoke directly to me.
From Crashing Suns, by Edmond Hamilton.
Published by Popular Fiction Publishing Co. in 1928
…television went three-dimensional and became teledar, inexpensive enough so that every Eskimo could own a set and incidentally the only industry where an actor might make a living.
As teledar took over entertainment, household devices began to move around in the form of robots powered by APRB (All-Purpose Broadcast Power)…
From The Jester, by William Tenn.
Published by Thrilling Wonder Stories in 1951
In the middle of this appeared a small solidograph image of the interior of the conveyor, showing the desk, and the control board, and the figure of Verkan Vall seated at it. The little figure of the storm trooper appeared, pistol in hand.
From Police Operation, by H. Beam Piper.
Published by Astounding SF in 1948
Several of Heinlein’s books also feature 3D TVs (Stranger in a Strange Land comes to mind), though I always pictured what he was describing as a three-dimensional array of pixels, so you couldn’t display any more depth than the depth of the device itself. And even if you’re restricting it to movies, Blade Runner has 3D photographs.
Sorry, for some reason when I read the OP, I thought “holographic controls,” and not “holographic displays.” I was thinking of stuff like Tony Stark’s lab in the Iron Man movies, where his whole computer interface is a hologram projected in midair, which he manipulates by waving his arms around in the air.
Holographiccontrols, in the sense of detecting your arm positions in 3D space and reacting to them, is already here. Kinect does this. You can get virtual keyboards that are projected on tables and which you can tap - with the tap being interpreted by lasers aimed at the table.
Open-air holography is just around the corner.
By the way, we got a Nintendo 3DS, and its pretty amazing. You can take 3D photographs, then have 3D characters embedded in them, so it looks like they are right in the room with you. You can put one of the àugmented realitycards on a table, then when you look at it through the 3DS screen little characters will jump out of the card and run around the table. You can even walk around the table and see all sides of them, just like a real hologram. You still have to look through the 3DS screen, but no glasses are required and the effect is startlingly real.
You should know that 3D movies without any need for special glasses have been around since the 1940s – Science Fiction writers in the 1940s didn’t have to predict them, as they were already a reality.
Such lenticular screens were constructed in Moscow and some other Russian cities, and to my knowledge haven’t been constructed or used elsewhere. Why this should be, I don’t know. I’ve seen several references to them, starting with the book Amazing 3D* by Symmes and Morgan and many times on the internet:
As the Symmes and Morgan book reports (and the Wikipedia page linked aove does, as well), 3D movies have actually been around for quite a while – the first commercial 3D movies ran in the 1920s (before the invention of Polaroid, or before they used the read-and-green anaglyphics), and patents for 3D movies go back to the 1890s (!). Science fiction writers, even in the 1920s, were doing what they do best – extrapolating from existing technology and research (and working that into a story, often on how it impacts society), rather than simply “predicting” the future.
Now that you mention this technique, I remember seen a very bad quality 3D effect in some postcards of the 70s! I don’t know if the principle is the same as the Russian movies, but certainly is not comparable with the holovizio.
The Nintendo 3DS uses an LCD lenticular display. The same technique as those old postcards. The difference is that the Nintendo is much higher in resolution, so the image looks more photographic than those old postcards, where the lenticular screen material itself was very visible. It was low-res 3D. Modern lenticular is high-res 3D.
The big problem with lenticular is the that you have to be looking in exactly the right place or the effect collapses. So it works well on a small personal screen, but not so much on a TV or theater screen. And it wouldn’t work well for a hologram-effect, since it couldn’t hold the 3D image while you walk around it.
The future of 3D is probably eye-tracking hardware and software that tracks exactly what you’re looking at and maybe even where you are focusing, and uses that to tailor a 3D image for you using some form of 3D image projection technology.
The biggest problem with 3D is eyestrain. In real life, when you look at something, all the other things around it go out of focus. But cinema 3D or holography cannot tell where you are focusing, so it has to render everything in the 3D space completely in focus. That makes your eyes constantly want to shift focus, which causes eyestrain. It’s also why computer-generated 3D looks strangely artificial. - even in 3D photographs like ViewMaster. They may be super clear with a strong 3D effect, but it still looks - strange. And it hurts to look at it too long.
If you mean by that what I think you mean, not only is it not right around the corner, but we don’t even have the foggiest idea of any basic physical principles which could conceivably lead to it. All 3D technologies that we have any clue of (which includes all the schemes with special glasses, lenticular, mirrors, genuine holograms, etc.) require that there be a screen or the equivalent on the line of sight. So you could have a screen as a “window” into a 3D world, and you can have things in front of a screen (as long as they don’t protrude beyond the edges of the screen), but you can’t just have a small thing that you put on the floor and which projects an image above it, which you can see from the sides. And for the things with images in front of a screen, you have to be careful of obstruction: If you made the entire wall of a room into a holographic screen, you could have an image projected between you and the wall, but the effect would be ruined if you reached around behind the image: Even though your hand is behind the image, it would still obstruct that portion of the image, a very disorienting effect.
I recently saw some small card-collecting binders that had some sort of lenticular cover that caused the image of it to appear 3-D unless looking at it from a very shallow angle. Given what it was on, it had to be extremely cheap to make (was just a repeating geometric pattern) but the effect was very good and very wide angle. Unfortunately, it hurt my eyes a ton and my head really started to hurt right after spending 30 seconds poking around looking at it to see just how much of an angle you had to see it from for the effect to be dispelled…
