There is a “star trek” quality about this invention.
You can have a conference call with a 3D full body image of the remote person that looks as if they have just beamed to your location.
Who needs holography for 3D?
It is becoming increasingly obvious that you don’t need to master the difficult techniques of real-time holography to create 3D displays. The trick is to use a Kinect, or any sort of depth camera, in sufficient quantities to map a full scene in 3D. Then it is just a matter of some 3D graphics to create wire-frame objects and map the live video onto the surfaces as a texture map. Then all you have to do is find a way to render the 3D graphics in 3D and allow it to interact with the user.
This approach has the big advantage that the extra data needed to create the full 3D effect is just a depth map and this can be transmitted over low bandwidth links.
To demonstrate that not only is all this possible but also desirable a team at The Human Media Lab at Queen’s University in Canada have created the TeleHuman – a 3D human sized video conferencing pod. People stand in front of a pod and talk to 3D images of each other.
Six Kinects are positioned around the top of the pod and these provide a full depth map of the person and his or her location.They also provide the video data used by the projector.
The cylinder is 1.7m tall and has a DepthQ stereoscopic projector in its base. This reflects off a hemispherical mirror which allows it to project an image onto the entire cylinder. Users can also wear shutter glasses to see images in full stereoscopy. Without the shutter glasses the image seems to be “trapped” on the surface of the cylinder; with the glasses the user gets a full 3D effect with the human appearing to be within the cylinder.
via I Programmer – Harry Fairheadᔥ
Bookmark this page for “full body hologram” and check back regularly as these articles update on a very frequent basis. The view is set to “news”. Try clicking on “video” and “2” for more articles.