Future of Holographic Technology Video Lecture - Civil Engineering (CE)

3D displays have already taken you to alien
worlds in the movies. Soon they'll take your
doctor inside your body.
Since we decided to spice up the cave walls
back at Lascaux, we have been obsessed with
creating ever more lifelike and realistic
images, and that includes 3D. Whether it's
a Hollywood gimmick, or the next generation
computer display, our visualization technology
has reshaped the way humans and machines interact.
Tech companies like Apple are buying up patents
to create glasses-free 3D displays. So you
can bet that 3D is still in our future. But
is it going to be like the movies? Are we
going to have free standing, floating holograms,
360 degrees around, like in Star Wars. R2D2
coming up and shooting out that image of Princess
Leia from whatever and...
*Help me Jonathan! You're My Only Hope!*
Ok that's creepy!
Nobody told me we were doing that. Can that
go away now?
Thanks.
We don't have the technology to make those
kinds of holograms, and maybe we never will.
A lot of that's due to the bad information
we've had about holography. For example, do
you remember when Tupac Shakur blew everyone's
minds by showing up at Coachella 2012 in hologram
form? Yeah, see that wasn't a hologram. That
was actually this really cool angled mirror
illusion called Pepper's Ghost, which we've
been using for more than a century to simulate
hauntings. So what exactly is a hologram anyway?
When you take a picture with a normal camera,
you're really just recording a single splash
of light across a two dimensional surface,
like film. But a holographic camera, well
that uses a laser beam splitter to split into
two beams of light. You've got one that's
just a clean reference signal, and another
one that you've run over a three dimensional
object. So you can measure all those nooks
and crannies and create a light map of that
object. So could we ever get to that free
standing hologram? Well one way we might try
is by using a lot of different projectors
to project light into a cloud of fog. Now
the fog would actually act as a three dimensional
movie screen, and particles within the fog
would actually reflect the light back to us.
Maybe we're even going to come up with technologies
we can't even dream of right now to make holograms
possible. But here's a paradox for you - when
did 3D become a gimmick? I mean, our world
is in three dimensions. It's 2D that's the
gimmick. We build machines in 3D, we play
with our pets in 3D. I think the ultimate
human-computer interface is one where we just
strip away all of that division so that our
non-computerized reality and our computer
experience are merged as one. I mean imagine
that you are a tele-surgeon. You've got a
hologram of the patient in front of you. The
actual patient is 100 miles away. You want
that to be as accurate and seamless as if
you were actually in the room with a blade
in your hand. Or imagine how much easier your
world would be if we could actually build
the holographic interfaces you've seen in
movies like Iron Man, where you move the data
around. It comes to you - you're no longer
playing in this two dimensional space, it's
playing in YOUR world. Holography might even
restore sight to the blind! You might be able
to use a combination of gene therapy and special
glasses that actually beam holograms back
to your eyes to restore your vision. And of
course holograms will play a big part in one
of my favorite subjects of all time: space
travel. We can already simulate the elements
of space travel using something like the Cave
2, which is at the University of Illinois
in Chicago. They've even taken footage from
the Mars landings and they can give you a
full three dimensional simulation of walking
around on Mars. And in the far future, Mars
colonists might get a little homesick, so
then they just go ahead and jump into Cave
3, and visit sweet home Chicago.