Dynamic and realistic 3D holograms, similar to those imagined in Star Wars, are possible thanks to new technology developed at the University of Science and Technology of China in Hefei and described in Optica magazine. Starting from virtual reality, the new technique paves the way for many possible applications.
Projecting dynamic images in 3D is one of the great dreams of science fiction and one of the best known cases are the holograms imagined in Star Wars, where some of the protagonists materialize virtually, but being able to do it in reality still poses great challenges. Despite the progress made since the first intuitions of the Hungarian Dennis Gabor, who received the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1971 for his discoveries, creating virtual 3D images composed of pure light without using screens, viewers or other supports is still very limited and expensive.
The research, coordinated by Panpan Yu, proposes a new approach to 3D video holography, called dynamic holography assisted by three-dimensional scattering (3D-Sdh) which allows to improve image definition up to 1000 times compared to current projection systems.
The key to the technology is a new typology of spatial light modulators, which manage to produce images of light as if they were so many superimposed slices, many more than the technologies used up to now, and finally give the illusion of a 3D object.
To demonstrate this, the researchers produced a 3D video, visible without using viewers or lenses, of a rocket: the image is composed of 125 ‘slices’, each of 1000 by 1000 pixels (i.e. the minimum ‘dots’ of light) .
Source: Ansa
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