I would be interested in reading more details about the technology. How does it work? How much power does it need? What makes manufacturing expensive? Can you make it bigger (holodeck sized)? Does it track the user's head position somehow or does it work for N users simultaneously?
If you look at the images, they look very much like stacked planes. I'm guessing - and it's a guess - that there is some largely-transparent device which can generate light on points on a plane, and that it is being rapidly moved up and down like a piston head, creating a persistence of vision display much like LEDs on a bike wheel.
The low-light conditions the pictures are taken in support that I think - it might be that the "points on a plane" are some kind of florescent plastic and there's a scanning laser underneath drawing on it, so the amount of light being generated at any given point is probably very low.
Concerning the moving piston: Rather than have a moving plane, they could be using stacked, electrically-switchable films. Ones that you can switch from transparent to only translucent (i.e. scattering) very quickly. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_glass)
Bear in mind that this technique can only produce light, not absorb it --- which means no hidden line removal, so it'll be good for wireframe images only, where you can see all sides of the shape at once. That doesn't mean it's not awesomely cool, but it's going to have limited applications.
IIRC, the piston-head technique has been tried before, and has always had the drawback that it's hellishly loud due to air displacement. I wonder how they're getting round this?
It looks amazing - almost too good to be true. The low lighting in the video make me feel like there is some kind of trickery happening here. I don't find it is surprising that their indiegogo campaign has been started without revealing technical details. It all just makes me a bit suspicious about the technology... I would love to be told otherwise.
It's definitely real. I've seen it, and no doubt so have many many others. As someone else here speculated it's a transparent screen moving up and down over a projector. It's pretty cool and worked in a reasonably light environment.
An active crowdfunding campaign was required for us to exhibit at the TechCrunch Disrupt expo. It tied in nicely with a popup exhibition we have been talking about doing for a while now.
It's not actually a new technique, this. You have a transparent screen (or LEDs or what have you) and move it up and down very quickly, and your persistence of vision makes it look like a single image. Just as a 1D line of dots becomes a 2D image by spinning it (you've all seen those LED fans[0], or heard of John Logie Baird's televisions), so too does a 2D matrix of dots become a 3D image by moving it vertically.
I assume what's new here is that the VoxieBox does a particularly good job of it.
Hmm the purple excited me for a second. I spent a while in my twenties and thinking about this, and one of the possibilities I came up with was 2-photon excitation of nitrogen to produce fluorescence - which would be purple. With two lasers you could draw a purple dot at any point in air. No idea if this would work, of course.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 76.3 ms ] threadThe low-light conditions the pictures are taken in support that I think - it might be that the "points on a plane" are some kind of florescent plastic and there's a scanning laser underneath drawing on it, so the amount of light being generated at any given point is probably very low.
IIRC, the piston-head technique has been tried before, and has always had the drawback that it's hellishly loud due to air displacement. I wonder how they're getting round this?
It's a electromechanical device, so getting it to holodeck size may be challenging.
[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_Silverman (he wrote the Build engine, which powers Duke Nukem 3D and other games)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KfVS-npfVuY
Still intriguing though!
Some gas / dye that emits light (or even just becomes opaque) above a certain level of incident radiation, and two scanning lasers.
But as usual, in theory != in practice. Trying to get something that's safe, won't dissipate too quickly, and isn't opaque...
Air itself would work, but there's this minor matter of "ozone, and lasers powerful enough to ionize air, isn't the best for you".
I wonder if one could stimulate condensation... Though then you'd probably get water on things.
http://www.extremetech.com/gaming/174772-voxiebox-a-real-lif...
It's a real system, works just like the videos. They have been working on this for years, since at least 2008.
Well done Will and Gav!
Plenty more videos available from https://youtu.be/hi1UiGr6Iow
Does your TV work outside of your TV?
Still, it is amazing. This is something that makes me feel like I'm living in the future.
I assume what's new here is that the VoxieBox does a particularly good job of it.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F_1X6M0PqG4
Edit: Here's a YouTube video of another device using a similar technique, except it's layering LED fans!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ey-eO-H2_Mk