The 3D holographic display machine inspired by Star Wars
A company has developed what they say is the first commercially available hologram projector
For the 25 years I have been writing about technology, the prospect of holograms has been floating around like, well, a hologram.
Indeed, even earlier, my 1972 sixth-form general studies project on future technology promised, on the best evidence, that by the 1980s, it would be possible to project a talking hologram of your late grandmother into her favourite chair.
Five years later, a holographic Princess Leia pleaded for help from Obi-Wan Kenobi in the first Star Wars film, yet beyond that, the technology has been a little behind schedule.
But a company working from Flinders University in Adelaide, South Australia, has quietly been developing what they say is the first commercially available hologram projector, and the video and still images it casts are spookily like the Star Wars imaginings.
I watched a 10cm-tall version of a real footballer playing keepy-uppy and was able to move around him to view his movements from all angles. Among the striking demos, I also saw hologrammic versions of CT scans which could be viewed as if you had X-ray eyes.
The $9,800 Voxon VX1 machine, a squat black cube with a 20cm square glass top from which the image is “written” into the air, makes a wheezy chugging noise which definitely was not present in Star Wars, but is still impressive.
The machine’s principle is to laser project 1,400 layers, or slices, of an image simultaneously by a vibrating mechanism and rely on our persistence of vision to see the result as a “real” 3D object.
Early buyers, say makers Voxon Photonics, include Harvard University and MIT, car companies, medical faculties, a major computer games company, advertising agencies and companies mapping the seabed.
At Harvard, one of the applications developed was to look at a dance performance from different angles. A watch company has used it at an exhibition to show the inside of a mechanical watch.
One of the machine’s inventors, Gavin Smith, a Strathclyde University MSc who came to Adelaide from Scotland 12 years ago, admits Star Wars was the inspiration for the Voxon 1.
“I was working in IT and, with my co-founder, got interested in optics and lasers, and were especially intrigued with the idea of making the hologram from Star Wars,” Mr Smith explained. “There are plenty of technologies which create an illusion of an image in space, but nothing that makes true 3D imagery which can be walked around and looked at from any angle without a headset.”
The inventive pair became adept at picking up electronic junk left out for recycling on Adelaide’s streets and using parts from it. They also wrote custom graphics software and in time, produced their first hologram, of a tiny elephant, and put a video on YouTube.
But then they were contacted by a group in the US who had done almost the same, with a tiny holographic dinosaur. They joined forces and got a famous games programmer, Ken Silverman, to write a graphics programme much faster than that needed for a video game.
The company now has 16 employees, and an effective A$1.5m seed-round funding raised in South Australia. They are now looking to raise a further US$10m.
Medicine may be the first area where it starts to be used for real. When doctors show patients CT and MRI scans, they are difficult for a lay person to interpret.
“If the doctor can bring up a walk-around image of your actual bone structure when you’ve broken a limb, you have an understanding of what’s needed — and will also be able to see a scan of a similar break post-operative, with the titanium pins in place, to get a full idea of what’s being done.”
At the other end of the scale, Mr Smith envisions not long from now a new form of entertainment, where you watch a real football match live, in miniature, on a table soccer machine.
On the matter of projecting the late granny into her chair, however, Voxon do not yet have an answer.