Yup, like I said, there’s a physical object (in this case, the foil) in the line of sight. You could, in principle, combine this with true holography (though there are a lot of engineering issues to work out) to make a 3D image of the actor on stage, but you’d still need the foil screen or something equivalent.
Artificial gravity.
Laser rifles. Any laser powerful enough to punch a hole through a human being is also powerful enough to blind anybody in line of sight with reflected light if it happens to hit anything metal. If the good guys are firing green lasers and wearing green-blocking goggles, and the bad guys are firing red lasers and red-blocking goggles, whoever shoots first wins.
Plus, simply punching a cauterized hole through somebody doesn’t render them combat ineffective unless you hit a particularly vital point–with bullets, you can expect them to bleed to death, and with boat-tail rounds, you can chew a particularly nasty path through the body, but the typical laser (or blaster, if you will) is just going to hurt a lot and the target will still be able to shoot back.
Cite? Seems to me if you dump enough energy into a body with a broad enough beam, the flesh ought to vaporize in the center and explode from steam pressure further out. That’s a lot more damaging than a bullet wound. Even if you use a powerful narrow beam, there will still be enough “shake” in the beam path to chop the target into bantha-chow.
Even for a Jedi, lightsabers are impractical weapons unless your enemy is committed to using weapons that are easy to block. It is possible for a modern weapon (for instance, an M61 Vulcan) to put numerous bullets (100/second) on target in sufficiently different places within such a short timeframe of each other, that all your precognitive senses would tell you is ‘you are about to die’ because you have a blocking surface that’s too small to block them all simultaneously. Some sort of futuristic weapon would be able to put even more shots on target within an even shorter timeframe. Lightsabers are ‘practical’ purely on the rule of cool.
As to other things that will never happen, I suspect that free-floating ‘cloud-type’ nanobots that can fabricate items on demand out of seemingly nothing will never happen, or at least that they are so far in the future they may as well be considered impossible to us. Similarly, ‘biotechnology’ the way it’s portrayed in certain sci-fi with super properties that allow it to adapt and regenerate and be all-around better than mechanical things at whatever it does seems like a nonsensical fantasy as well.
I’m not sure what you’re saying, here. If the aircraft autopilot flies itself, why would I need a pilot’s license to sit in it?
Yes, really. Planes can already fly themselves pretty well. The technological challenges of autonomous flying vehicles are already a very active field of study. I’m sure there will be some minor disasters and fear-based reactionary laws passed, but I don’t think you can keep good tech down forever.
Well, I never said cheaper. Physics being what it is, you’re not ever likely to be able to fly somewhere cheaper than you can get there on the ground. But, cheaper, compared to the fraction of our disposable income we spend on driving today? That’s just a matter of economic growth. Airplanes are already substantially safer than cars are today. Do you anticipate that trend reversing? And auto-pilots are pretty easy to use.
Everyone will not be a private pilot. That’s clearly not going to happen. Autonomous, affordable, just-in-time chartered air-taxis are well within a reasonably potential technology/economy growth curve for the upper middle class within a few decades.
A shotgun firing 00 buck would probably do the trick.
Sorry, I thought we were talking about tech as it’s used in TV and Movies. Whenever I see people “killed” with lasers, there’s a little black dot where they got hit, and maybe a bigger burn on the surface, and they fall over dead. Sure, if you’re dumping enough energy into them to vaporize an arm or create a hole big enough to toss a pumpkin through, that’s going to throw their aim off a bit, but short of Starship Troopers (or light sabers cutting limbs off), I don’t usually see that level of destruction associated with laser weapons.
Actually I just showed the surveillance tech at work a new camera that lets you change focus on an already snapped pic. Link to demo. You can buy one of those for a couple hundred bucks.
The problem for video would be storage right now. A single pic on that camera is about 21 megs (if I am doing my math right, a bit tired right now). But, toss a bunch of terabytes at a storage system, add some video capability and some processing and you will basically be able to capture anything in line of sight.
Slee
Upon preview, beaten to the punch.
They must use a non focussed photo, and record a depth map, with the blur a post filter. I do that on my 3D generated imagery.
The cool thing about that, if it’s so, is that a depth map gives you 3D information you can manipulate the photo with, making it stereoscopic, or add in a layer that can go behind things in the image.
If they did this same thing for video, it would make visual effects so much easier.
Most of those “enhance” scenes on CSI and such have nothing to do with a unfocused picture. You can easily get everything in focus just by having a small aperture. The image is blurry because of low resolution. I could go outside right now, focus on a car down the street, and take a picture of it. You still won’t be able to read the license plate because it’s just too tiny.
There are a lot of engineering issues to work out with respect to phased array optical display technology, but in theory this could be used to display three dimensional images in the round, more or less; see
If you covered every available surface in your environment with phased-array emitters, some remarkable image effects could be acheived. Not likely to happen in the near future, but maybe one day…
I’m still waiting for good simulacrums, of long-dead movie stars. It should be possible to make up a perfectly good computerized image of say, Humphrey Bogart, and cast “him” in a new CGI movie.
Will this happen soon?
Didn’t they do this recently with Tupac Shakur?
Mission Impossible-style latex masks that are undetectable as fakes face-to-face. A quarter inch of latex is gonna look like a rubber mask, no matter how well you paint it. Watch the behind-the-scenes bits for the LOTR, and see what the midgets with the hobbit masks on looked like.
With the phased array generators, your line of sight still has to pass through the device. And you get weird effects if an obstruction (like, say, a real human) walks between an image and the device: All of your other visual cues would be telling you that the image is in front of the person, but yet the person would be obstructing the image. It’s very disorienting.
And actually, we do have such devices now: That’s what a hologram is. The difficulty is in making them changeable.
Oh, and the cameras that focus after the picture is taken are actually taking multiple images to start with, at different focus. Focusing after the fact is a combination of picking the ones that are closest, and a sort of interpolation.
I didn’t say a pilot’s licence, I said the same kind of licencing and regulatory framework - because we generally require oversight of people equipped with deadly missiles, and the potentially deadlier, the more oversight. That the missiles practically fly themselves is no get-out clause. As you mentioned, modern planes practically fly themselves - has their regulatory load slackened in proportion?
And the huge difference between planes and anything I would consider a “flying car”? No runways, no fixed routes (or, at least as open as the modern roadway system). Anything else is a fancy plane or helicopter.
I’m sure it is. That doesn’t mean it’ll overcome the regulatory load or public perception.
Which is why we have so many hydrogen-filled airships around…they’re able to be made safe with modern materials and engineering, and they’d be useful for lots of applications. But … Hindenbug! And now it’s helium or nothing.
Not appreciably, but I still think it will. We’re just starting to get regulatory approval for self-driving cars, and the FAA is reconsidering rules for commercial drone operations. I think that there will be increasing support for such changes as self-driving cars have a proven safety record, and airlines would love to reduce their expensive payrolls. I could definitely be wrong about this, but I’d be surprised. It’s hard to hold back major technological and economic pressures with regulation.
That’s a good point. I’m not familiar enough with the economics of dirigibles compared to other modes of travel. My impression is that the desire for a personal air-taxi would be huge, while the desire for airship travel just isn’t that big. Does having to use helium instead of hydrogen have a major impact on the economics such that it would make people want to take airships (if they weren’t irrationally fearful/regulated out of it)? If not, I don’t think you’re really comparing apples to apples here.
The hydrogen/helium airship example strikes me as being like the stem-cell research restrictions. It was a big political issue that led to restrictive regulation, but ultimately it was really only a relatively minor speedbump in the advancement of genetic technology.
Ultimately, if enough people want something, I think the regulations will be reformed, or we’ll figure out a way around them soon enough that no one cares that much about them.
Commerical air travel is safer than car travel, measured by miles traveled by passenger divided by number of dead bodies. Light aircraft travel is not. Small planes carry a lot fewer passengers and crash a lot more frequently.
The reason commercial airlines are safe is that they are flown by professionals, maintained by professionals, and controllled by professionals. The reason light airplanes aren’t safe is that they are flown by some guy, maintained by some guy, and controlled by some guy. That some guy might be a professional pilot and mechanic and navigator who flew hundreds of sorties over the Gulf of Tonkin, or it could be a guy who passed a pilot’s license test.
We may someday have light aircraft with lots of safety features and autonomous piloting that are used much more frequently than today, but such things won’t be anything like flying cars. An aircraft is not a car. We don’t call boats floating cars, do we?
There already exist ultralight planes that aren’t that expensive and are pretty easy to fly. Ever heard of someone commuting via ultralight?
I live on Vashon Island near Seattle. No bridge, only way to commute to work is by ferry. For many years one of our wealthy citizens used to commute to work via helicopter. He had a pilot and a mechanic, and he’d zip to his office in West Seattle and back. A couple of years ago he moved to Arizona. Then he and his wife and daughter were killed in a helicopter accident. Helicopters and light planes aren’t safe.