Reminds me that there are limitations to volumetric displays—namely that, since you have no idea where the viewer is located, there is no backface culling you can perform. So it seems to work best for "cutaway" views.
I'd like to see one in person. Might be "magical" — the video only kind of hints at this.
I think this limitation could be overcome with the right hardware.
For example imagine a spinning display like those of the article but somehow tuned so that they are only visible when exactly head on. In that case, you know where the observer is: right in line with the screen. So you can have backface culling; as the display spins you render all 360 (or however many) viewpoints.
Now granted, this doesn't deal with how high or low the observer is. We'd need to find another solution for that.
I think it's worth pointing out that "in operation" here means it's running Doom. Which I was not expected, and somewhat blown away (heh) by. Very very cool.
feel like I saw this in a hackaday, at least remember hearing the podcast about projecting all the rays at all intersections, it was green though maybe I'm thinking of something else
oh wow yeah I've seen a lot of this channel's work before the lego display, the CV fiber optic bundle display
I once considered making a spinning persistence of vision similar to this one specifically for visualizing lidar data from a spinning automotive lidar. The lidar has 128 beams and you could make a spinning array of 128 1D LED displays at exactly the same beam angles to recreate the point cloud from the lidar.
Anyway, I was too lazy to make it, but it's super neat to see that someone actually made something similar.
I wonder if you could have a vibrating chladni plate with sand on it and you match when the sand should jump with the light that's meant to be at that spot. You get the interruption of light looking like a mid-air pixel and then when it isn't needed it drops back down allowing light to pass through. Kind of like one of those mist-screens except there isn't mist where you don't need it.
Before I watched the video, my brain ran ahead and I imagined it would be one of those led "fans", except also rotating around it's base. It might be harder to sync the two rotations, but you'd have much less mass in motion that way.
The solid state ones are cool! The real mystery there is how the pixel volume was manufactured -- it doesn't seem like something easily DIY'd
Would be great having one of these hooked up to an LLM agent so it can be somehow “embodied”. Like a Siri + volumetric display + speaker. Waiting for a company to build this.
I'm sure I'm not the only one who thought "why not vacuum", so I went and found the creator's reasoning [0] for why it's not a priority:
> [I]nside the dome the air quickly ends up rotating at the same rate as the rest of the mechanism. It's reaching its design speed with the motor at less than half duty cycle. Even if it were practical to make the whole thing airtight, it doesn't solve a problem that I currently have. The sound it makes doesn't come from inside the dome but from the motor in the base.
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[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 52.0 ms ] threadReminds me that there are limitations to volumetric displays—namely that, since you have no idea where the viewer is located, there is no backface culling you can perform. So it seems to work best for "cutaway" views.
I'd like to see one in person. Might be "magical" — the video only kind of hints at this.
For example imagine a spinning display like those of the article but somehow tuned so that they are only visible when exactly head on. In that case, you know where the observer is: right in line with the screen. So you can have backface culling; as the display spins you render all 360 (or however many) viewpoints.
Now granted, this doesn't deal with how high or low the observer is. We'd need to find another solution for that.
This ones does not: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wrfBjRp61iY
Volumetric display in the video above uses static projector whose pixels light up etchings inside solid glass.
oh wow yeah I've seen a lot of this channel's work before the lego display, the CV fiber optic bundle display
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46137203
https://www.tiltfive.com/
Anyway, I was too lazy to make it, but it's super neat to see that someone actually made something similar.
- software
- math
- 3d printing
- electronics
Very impressive.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nM7wsXcYQFM
which I guess is the "volume" part
The solid state ones are cool! The real mystery there is how the pixel volume was manufactured -- it doesn't seem like something easily DIY'd
> [I]nside the dome the air quickly ends up rotating at the same rate as the rest of the mechanism. It's reaching its design speed with the motor at less than half duty cycle. Even if it were practical to make the whole thing airtight, it doesn't solve a problem that I currently have. The sound it makes doesn't come from inside the dome but from the motor in the base.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pcAEqbYwixU&lc=UgygtRUb6XZyu...
Shameless plug, I made a similar thing but for bike wheels!
https://youtu.be/o8n-bu2kKnc?si=BPn8tRbFTiQROJg1