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Posts Tagged ‘3-D’

PopSci and National Instruments hand top honors to a Chinese team that could revolutionize 3-D

College students have a special aptitude for bending LabView to their will, and the finalists on display in Austin were very hard to choose between.

Rice University built a sensor-filled baseball that precisely transmits the mechanics of a throw to better teach pitching. UC San Diego created a trumpet that not only detects the exact pitch being played, but can bend that pitch in real time to hit the proper note—a sort of auto-tune for the brass section. The University of Konkuk, South Korea, created an autonomous flying drone out of remarkably few parts. And the University of Leeds built an astounding haptic feedback system for simulating the feel of tumors under the hands of doctors in training.

In the end, however, we chose the entry from Tsinghua University, China. Five students there built an entirely new 3-D imaging system. They conquered the classic glasses-or-no-glasses problem by simply stepping around it: instead of a conventional flat screen, they built a four-sided glass enclosure which displays the four sides of a simulated object. The system scans an object on a turntable, acquires the image data, and reproduces it by projecting the image with four projectors onto four panes of glass. Walk around the simulated object on display, and it’s like walking around it in real life. In addition, the system recognizes gestures, allowing you to rotate and zoom in on an object with your hands. You can imagine the implications for medical analysis, enhanced teaching, point-of-sale displays, and telecommunication.

The thing that blew my mind, however, was the sheer discipline of these kids in dealing with costs. They had developed several alternative systems, they told me, including one that used a rotating mirror and a high-speed projector. But they had given themselves the goal of keeping the thing cheap, and this was the cheapest workable solution.

The adoption of prototying software like LabView seems to be collapsing the time and costs involved in building new devices. “We’re still far away from a product,” Gao Yongfeng, a member of the 3-D team, told me. But the kid’s still in college. By the time he’s headed to grad school, this thing could be on store shelves.

Can't wait for 3-D printed grills. Are you listening, Lil Wayne?

The contest rules are fairly simple, and also fairly modest--no titanium claws quite yet. The proposal has to be in a typical 3-D printing format like STL or OBJ, the final object cannot be larger than 4 cubic centimeters or have walls thinner than 0.4 mm, and it must be fully functional (or awesome-looking) directly out of the printer. That means no added electronics or parts can be added afterwards--this thing has to be printed and done, just like that.

It's an awfully open-ended contest, with tons of possible ways to interpret it. i.Materialize imagines the aforementioned earring-as-antenna, but also chopsticks that attach to fingers, printed titanium teeth (which is where Lil Wayne comes in), or some kind of implant that holds your nose open so you can breathe easier without one of those adhesive things football players wear. The full contest rules are here--we're looking forward to some great ideas, especially after seeing the future of 3-D printing.

[i.Materialize]

Can't wait for 3-D printed grills. Are you listening, Lil Wayne?

The contest rules are fairly simple, and also fairly modest--no titanium claws quite yet. The proposal has to be in a typical 3-D printing format like STL or OBJ, the final object cannot be larger than 4 cubic centimeters or have walls thinner than 0.4 mm, and it must be fully functional (or awesome-looking) directly out of the printer. That means no added electronics or parts can be added afterwards--this thing has to be printed and done, just like that.

It's an awfully open-ended contest, with tons of possible ways to interpret it. i.Materialize imagines the aforementioned earring-as-antenna, but also chopsticks that attach to fingers, printed titanium teeth (which is where Lil Wayne comes in), or some kind of implant that holds your nose open so you can breathe easier without one of those adhesive things football players wear. The full contest rules are here--we're looking forward to some great ideas, especially after seeing the future of 3-D printing.

[i.Materialize]

The technique is based on the behavior of free electrons on a metal surface, according to researchers at the RIKEN Institute in Japan.

A typical hologram is essentially a light-wave pattern, which is made by bouncing laser light off an object and onto a photographic plate. Shining light onto the etched pattern re-creates the image. But most holograms, like those on credit cards, either show up as a single-color 3-D image or change color depending on the angle at which you observe them.

The new method uses the diffraction of excited electrons that propagate on a metal surface, according to Satoshi Kawata, co-author of a paper on the technique published today in the journal Science. Thin metal films contain free electrons, not bound to any atoms, which get excited when they interact with incoming photons. These oscillating electrons, called surface plasmons, emit a specific wavelength of colored light.

Depending on the angle of the incoming photons, different plasmons were excited, emitting different colors of light. The researchers bounced that colored light off an etched surface, creating a hologram that shows the same colors no matter the angle, just like the original object.

New 3-D TVs and gaming systems imitate depth by overlapping two-dimensional images. Users either have to wear glasses or buy a special display with a parallax barrier or lenticular lenses.

“Inside the brain we reconstruct 3-D, so it’s sort of an illusion,” Kawata said.

The plasmonic holograph is no illusion, he said — it’s a virtual image in 3-D full color.

The technique is relatively simple, according to Science, and could conceivably be used to make new glasses-free displays for still and moving images.

[Science]

Are baby birds' brains hard-wired for 3-D perception?

In a new study, newborn chicks were confused by an M.C Escher-style drawing of an impossible object, with the majority of the birds choosing an accurate 2-D depiction of a 3-D cube.

A group of Italian researchers kept 66 chicks in the dark for their first 24 hours of life, ensuring they had no visual stimulus, New Scientist reports. They put them in an enclosure and showed them two drawings, one depicting a normal cube and one depicting an “impossible” Escher-esque drawing, wherein the cube’s front and back corners overlapped.

Two-thirds of the chicks went toward the normal shape, the researchers said.

“These findings suggest that the vertebrate brain can be biologically predisposed towards approaching a two-dimensional image representing a view of a structurally possible three-dimensional object,” the researchers write. Their study is reported in the early online edition of the British journal Biology Letters.

Previous studies have shown 4-month-old infants can distinguish between possible and impossible objects. But the babies were able to see for four months before the experiment, possibly giving reality an unfair advantage over the impossible. The chick study suggests that even before a vertebrate animal sees anything, it understands the rules governing three-dimensional structures.

To follow up on their observations, perhaps the researchers should repeat the experiment using chicks gestated in a four-dimensional space. Or, even better, incubate the chicks inside the Large Hadron Collider, where they might be able to visit the other dimensions before hatching.

[New Scientist]

Microsoft researchers used PhotoSynth technology to build the app, but it goes beyond that photo-stitching program and also calculates the depth of an object. The model determines the camera’s location in space and determines the depth. You don’t have to worry about capturing perfectly overlapping panoramas — the software can smooth it all out, as Microsoft researcher Johannes Kopf explains to Technology Review.

The software preserves straight lines and eliminates holes and weird triangular gaps, a common problem in 3-D stitching.

To make a model, you would walk around an object, snapping overlapping pictures from different angles. Upload them to a server for processing, and the app downloads a 3-D model that you can grab and spin on your phone’s touchscreen. It recreates your view as you walked around, allowing you to see the object from every angle. Technology Review explains in further detail.

This could be useful for selling items online, among a myriad other uses. The app uses much less bandwidth than a 3-D video would, because it only needs a few images.

The project was developed at Microsoft's Interactive Visual Media group.

[Technology Review]

Porn isn't your thing? More 3-D content providers are hopping the bandwagon. We break them down here

Sony/Discovery/IMAX's 3DNet

The big 3-D content announcement from this year's CES came at Sony's press conference. The company is going all-in on 3-D, with TVs, cameras, and camcorders all boasting 3-D capabilities, so it only makes sense for the company to provide some way for owners of all that equipment to actually watch 3-D content. The tech giant is partnering with Discovery and IMAX, two other 3-D pioneers, to create 3DNet, a 24-hour 3-D network that will carry 3-D content from all three.

Sony has major resources in content, owning Sony Pictures as well as Sony Music, and indeed showed off a clip from the upcoming The Green Hornet in 3-D (preview: it looks surprisingly awesome). Sony will be providing movie and television content, as well as, intriguingly, "music- and game-related 3-D content." Discovery is granting rights to its legion of TV networks and the 3-D content emanating therefrom, and IMAX will also grant the television rights of its 3-D movie content. The channel might end up being a bit of a hodgepodge, but in the currently barren world of 3-D content, a do-everything channel isn't the worst idea.

Penthouse 3D

It's only surprising that it took this long, really: Penthouse announced that they will be the first, um, adult company (in the States, at least) to launch a 3-D channel, to be called Penthouse 3D. CEO Marc Bell says they began shooting in native 3-D "last summer," and is excited to keep expanding the use of the technology. Penthouse 3D will join the similarly groundbreaking Penthouse HD when it launches sometime in the second quarter of 2011.

ESPN 3D

ESPN 3D actually launched back in June, but only broadcasts occasionally now, mostly for big events like the World Cup. But sports programming is one of the few areas where 3-D is almost inarguably warranted--cinemaphiles will debate (and, often, hate) the introduction of 3-D in their art form, but the immediacy of sports broadcasts really lends itself to 3-D. ESPN, realizing the potential, is finally expanding ESPN 3D to a full-time, 24-hour broadcast, starting on February 14th (there's nothing more romantic than watching hockey players slammed against the glass in full 3-D, right?).

The network will still be rerunning most of its content, since there simply isn't enough 3-D footage out there to run nonstop (though I'm sure we're all anxiously awaiting SportsCenter 3-D). The first focus will be on basketball, with several games already scheduled in 3-D.

Vudu Streaming 3-D

Vudu's streaming movie service may not be as ubiquitous as Netflix's, but for spanking new releases, Vudu's the way to go. Vudu's available on nearly as many devices, too, including lots of Blu-ray players, connected TVs, the PlayStation 3, and media streamers like Boxee. Now Vudu's got a step up on Netflix, as they're the first to bring streaming 3-D movie content directly to your TV.

It's still early for streamed video to be available in 3-D--it requires much more bandwidth to stream in the same quality as a 2-D movie, and low-quality 3-D looks pretty much like a migraine feels, but Vudu is confident that they'll be able to keep the quality high. The first titles will be Bolt, Meet the Robinsons, and Chicken Little, and they'll be available next week. 3-D movies will cost $1 extra to rent and $2 extra to buy over the equivalent 2-D title, which is pretty generous compared to the high cost of physical 3-D movies.