The Force is strong with holographic scientists these days. Researchers from MIT unveiled the fastest 3-D holographic video to date at a conference in San Francisco January 23, filming a graduate student dressed as Princess Leia and projecting her as a postcard-sized hologram in real time.
The holographic device plays a 3-inch projection at 15 frames per second, just shy of movie refresh rates of 24 to 30 frames per second, the MIT researchers demonstrated at the Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers’ conference on practical holography.
The red hologram is jerkier
and has much lower resolution than the one in Star Wars that sparked the public fascination with 3-D holograms in
the 1970s. In fact, it kind of looks like a red blob on a staticky TV. But it’s
30 times faster than a telepresence device created in 2010 by University of Arizona
researchers (SN Online:
12/4/10).