Meet John and John. Which is the 'hologram'? (I'm guessing the one with the fake smile.)

Visitors to Manchester Airport may be a little startled when they meet customer service reps John and Julie – these newest additions to the staff are ‘holograms’. Created by UK based Musion, the EyeSay displays use powerful projectors to create a lifelike image on a transparent surface. By cutting that surface into the shape of people, Musion has created ‘holograms’ that appear to be 3D physical characters. The EyeSay displays play video recordings based on two of Manchester Airport’s actual staff, John Walsh and Julie Capper, and provide automated audio reminders about liquid restrictions and boarding passes. They are currently on display in Manchester Airport’s Terminal 1, and should help give their human counterparts time to handle more important tasks. Watch the EyeSay ‘holograms’ in action in the video below. I get the feeling I’m looking at the 21st century equivalent of cardboard cut-outs.

I know many of you will point this out if I don’t say it first: Musion’s EyeSay displays aren’t real holograms. They are simply lifelike rear projections on a well made surface that tricks your eye into accepting it as a three dimensional image. (You can clearly see the lens flare from the projector in the center of the video above at 0:21.) That’s okay, for this purpose we don’t need real holograms. As we’ve seen in previous coverage of Musion, these faux ‘holograms’ are sophisticated enough to give viewers the sense that they are sharing their space with a real 3D person.

Manchester is very proud to be the first airport to use these kinds of ‘holograms’ in their facilities, so it’s hard to separate out the hype when judging how useful the displays actually are. Certainly they provide an eyecatching image that visitors may pay more attention to than they would to a simple audio recording. Because the John and Julie-grams can be replicated as many times as needed, they may also be freeing up a considerable number of workers from having to mindlessly repeat notifications to airport visitors. That being said, neon signs were once cutting edge technology as well, but I can’t tell you the last time I really paid attention to one. The EyeSays may have an edge over the boring posters that inhabit airports today, but give travelers a few years to get used to the idea and I’m sure they’ll ignore them too.

Here's Julie Capper, the second of the models for the Manchester EyeSays. If I'd been immortalized as a 'hologram' I'd be pretty smug too.

Which isn’t to say the concept itself doesn’t have a future. Far from it. Musion’s invasion of the Manchester Airport is another sign that lifelike virtual projections are a growing force in digital displays. Musion markets them as accessories for tele-conference presentations, but they have a huge range of applications. We’ve seen a very similar concept help a Japanese teen go from virtual character to real world rock star. You could use rear projections almost anywhere you use regular video advertisements (billboards, shops, etc). All you need is enough space to separate the projector from the display surface.

Eventually we’ll probably see a switch from rear projections to actual holograms and other 3D technologies that don’t have as great of spatial requirements. We’ve already seen some early holographic video displays that are promising. Needless to say it would also be wonderful when we will be able to make these technologies interactive as well. Devices like the Musion EyeSay (or its holographic betters) may one day provide the means for us to communicate with virtual characters in a way that we find engaging. Why just listen to a hologram when you can talk to it and ask it questions? That’s when things will get really exciting. Of course, asking a hologram about its personal life can be a strange experience. We should tread carefully.

[image and video credits: Manchester Airport]
[sources: Manchester Airport, Musion]

Many technologies claim to be holograms, but there’s really only one that truly deserves the name. If you have to wear special glasses, it’s not a real hologram. For decades, scientists have been able to use lasers to record three dimensional images on a flat surface, but these images have been very simple and were often difficult to view without more laser light. Now, a new generation of hologram companies are making 3D holograms that are photo realistic and can be viewed under simple LED and halogen bulbs. Zebra Imaging, based in Austin, Texas, is one of these new kind of hologram companies, and they’ve sold tens of thousands of custom-made digital prints, many to the US military for mission planing and bomb analysis. Watch their holographic prints on display in the videos below, along with a brief look at their new motion display technology, which is like a 3D computer screen. There’s nothing quite as cool as a real hologram.

In the past few years, researchers in holography have been able to streamline and modernize the holographic printing process so that they can take CAD drawings or real world images and convert them into a hologram quickly. Zebra Imaging takes about 7-10 business days to process images into a print. That’s a fairly quick turn around time, and it opens up their use for a variety of purposes. One of the chief customers has been the US Army who not only has purchased more than 10,000 prints, but recently started using Zebra’s M2 imagers in the field. The M2 allows a soldier or technician to record the visual information needed to create a hologram – sort of the holography version of a camera. Zebra also has a variety of commercial applications, including displays for trade shows, industrial design, and marketing. CTO Michael Klug explains more in the video below:

Here’s a longer look at a military application for Zebra’s “Zscape” holographic prints. (Note: the video seems to end around 0:30, no idea why the timer continues beyond that.)

The US Army has used Zebra's prints to help reconstruct and understand bomb sites after the explosion.

As you can see in the videos, the hologram print looks like a flat sheet of plastic on metal. Embedded on that sheet however, is over 300,000 3D views. By traveling around the print (or moving it) you see each of these hundreds of thousands of views and the parallax makes the image appear perfectly three dimensional. Zebra, however, can put those 300,000 views to an even more interesting use: combining multiple images into the same print. In the following video you’ll see how traveling around this print causes the 3D image you see to ‘switch’ midway. Very cool.

For now, the price this holography is still a little high to be used in many possible applications. The smallest single color prints from Zebra cost $700, with full 2′ x 3′ color prints ranging up to $3500. Not bad if you have a military budget, but pretty steep for the rest of us. Considering how much progress has already been made in holography, however, I’m fairly confident we’ll see these prices come down considerably in the years ahead (if not at Zebra then through one of their competitors).

Zebra's motion display setup lets you see 3D images rendered in real time.

Moving away from prints, Zebra has also developed a remarkable real time holographic motion display. Like a computer screen, the motion display can show you images changing over time that you can interact with. Unlike you computer screen, these images are shown in 3D and without the need for glasses. Zebra’s motion display was developed with help from DARPA, who is probably giddy over the possible military applications (picturing a battle in 3D as it evolves is right up their alley). The system works by taking 3D digital information, rendering it with commercial software, and displaying it through a podium like structure. Unfortunately, Zebra has only released one video of the motion display in action, and its very brief. Below you’ll see a LIDAR image of the MIT campus as it is rendered in real time using the motion display. Check it out:

As cool as Zebra Imaging’s holography may be, the field of holography as a whole has been very slow in development. I’m sure we all saw some kind of holographic image growing up. As I said in the beginning, holograms have been here for decades (even before we had reliable lasers). The real innovation is the quality of images produced and the speed at which they can be made. A business week turn around time is fast enough for holograms to be used in a wide variety of applications. Military purposes are interesting, but they’re just the tip of the iceberg. As holography technology keeps improving we’ll be able to make these prints quicker, larger, and easier. 3D hologram prints could become a fixture for advertising, architecture, and medical displays. Imagine dozens of MRI images each showing a slice of your brain being contained in a single 3D hologram. Or walk down the street and every poster and billboard could reach out to you in 3D, or evolve as you move past. Eventually we could be using holographic displays instead of LCD TVs and monitors. The technology is still rather limited now, but it is improving. As companies like Zebra Imaging prove there is considerable financial gain to be had.  I think holography will develop more and more quickly. In the meantime I really just enjoy looking at the amazing 3D images we can already produce. Everybody loves a hologram.

Here’s proof:

[image and video credits: Zebra Imaging]
[source: Zebra Imaging]

$10 of hardware and you could get medical lab results in just five minutes. Insane!

In the field of global medicine, laboratories are a precious commodity. Yet even if a remote village doesn’t have access to a local lab or even a doctor, they may be able to get reliable test results…through a mobile phone. Professor Aydogan Ozcan at UCLA has been developing a series of attachments for phones that will act as microscopes, but without lenses. Using hardware that costs less than $10, these mobile microscopes will be able to use the shadows of cells to detect illnesses. Ozcan, through his new company Microskia, is trying to bring these attachments to market and connect them, via the mobile phone, to a database which will then text the phone with results in just five minutes! Doctors, or maybe anyone with a phone in the field, could use the system to make quick, cheap, and accurate assessments of diseases. Check out the video from UCLA after the break.

Most of the emerging cases of HIV are in India and Africa, where access to central labs is infrequent. Checking blood samples in even the most routine cases can take days. Likewise with Malaria, still one of the biggest killers and most feared infectious diseases in the world. Different versions of Ozcan’s mobile phone attachments could help diagnose patients with these diseases in just minutes, providing better opportunities for care. As this technology develops, private use could expand as well. Imagine being able to take a daily blood sample at home and test it daily for pathogens. You could know you were sick before you ever had symptoms. There are other dangerous microscopic particles besides pathogens. Mobile phone microscopy could help researchers find asbestos, lead, or other environmental poisons quickly. With this level of quick analysis, healthcare and longevity would improve dramatically.

Another team at UC Berkeley has developed a similar product called the cellscope. Ozcan’s device however, uses no lenses, and doesn’t take traditional images of cells. Magnification is done digitally, not optically.The system is called LUCAS or Lensless Ultra-wide-field Cell monitoring Array platform based on Shadow imaging. A mouthful to say, an impressive concept to see in action. Using relatively cheap light emitting diodes, LUCAS is able to form a sort of shadow holography, creating detailed images derived from the transparency of cells. That cell shadow contains a lot of information about the health of the cell.

Unlike traditional light microscopy, LUCAS uses shadows of cells to analyze them. These are stained white blood cells.

When LUCAS is used on a sample, healthy and infected cells are shown side by side. In this way, the analysis is more holistic than traditional light microscopy and could assist researchers in forming the database used to recognize illnesses. That database is very important because LUCAS does not produce traditional images. Untrained medical professionals, and even experienced lab technicians, would not necessarily be able to translate the LUCAS images into a diagnosis on their own.

The cell shadow database, and the LUCAS hardware is still under development. As shown in the UCLA video, there will likely be many different forms of the mobile phone attachments, not just to fit with the various phone models, but also to provide different kinds of imaging in the field. There are versions with USB connections for phones without cameras and at least one version with different color LEDs to help with specific disease recognition.

Ozcan’s system is promising, amazingly so. And while I’m excited about possibilities in global healthcare it may one day provide, I am uncertain how long it will take to realize his goals. The LUCAS database will have to be assembled very thoroughly and designed to handle an impressive amount of traffic in order to serve as a world wide diagnostic tool. Even if confined to more traditional forms of microscopy (like that used by Cellscope), mobile diagnosis would still require an extensive technical support system. Still, Ozcan has a few things going for him: his own dedicated brilliance, and the rise of highly sophisticated narrow artificial intelligence. We may one day see mobile diagnostic tools contacting not a doctor, but an AI that can analyze blood samples in microseconds. Oh the possibilities. We’ll let you know if any of it actually happens.

[photo credits: Ozcan via NY Times]
[video credit: UCLA]

The Wizard of Oz? Emperor Palpatine? Jambi from Pee-wee's Playhouse? No, that's just Andrew in accounting.

While holographic teleconferencing may be a wonderful application of this technology, the effects could be seen in a far wider arena. ICT can broadcast your face in real time, but they can also do the same with almost any image. Pre-recorded images can be rotated and manipulated and viewed in a full 360° arc. The possibilities for modeling and sharing 3D images are amazing. You can also scale large recorded images (like someone’s full body) down to fit in the head-sized viewing area. Hopefully we’ll see this scaling incorporated into the teleconferencing system. How cool would it be to have real Star Wars style communication in your home or office? Check out the pre-recorded image demonstration video further below.

While some may define true holography as involving phased laser light, ICT took a somewhat simpler approach. The secret is an A-frame made of two slightly concave mirrors and a really smart timing algorithm. Project an image onto a mirror and it appears at some point in space. Rotate the mirror and you can trace that point in a full 360° arc. Rotate fast enough, and each point in space can have multiple images shown per second. Basically each point in space gets its own simple animation. With the right timing, you can show the left eye and right eye slightly different images and make an object appear in 3D. Sounds complicated, looks awesome.

For real-time teleconferencing, a person sits in front of a few cameras. These cameras can develop a 3D image of someone using some special lamps that illuminate the face with a wave pattern. If you’re really interested in the technical aspect of it, the third video explains it pretty well. Suffice to say that the combination of lighting and cameras allow someone to appear as a 3D hologram without using a true 3D scanner. This makes the conferencing faster so you don’t have a lag between the adoring public and Max Headroom.

Now, while ICT has managed to create a great way of viewing a 3D image, the use of a high speed rotating mirror has negated any possibility of getting close to the hologram. I’d really love to see the combination of the tactile holography we discussed before (also seen at SIGGRAPH) and 3D object projection as seen with ICT. That would open up a really great opportunity for full-body holographic telepresence. Right now, however, trying to touch an ICT image would likely get your finger chopped off. Not so good.

Also, while the teleconference head can make eye-contact, which is huge, it is still prone to glitches. Vertical tracking allows people at different heights to see the corresponding correct portion of the face, but see if you notice how certain parts of the face seem to cut in and out during the videos above. ICT may need some upgrades in computer processing speeds and projector resolution before these artifacts are corrected.

While ICT’s head hologram has some amazing features that far exceed traditional teleconferencing, I’m not sure it’s going to catch on. You need a special setup and special recording equipment to get it to work. It may be a select few who are willing to make such an investment when you can use a $150 monitor and a $50 webcam to accomplish a 2D version. The 360° image viewing may catch on for object modeling, but again, that’s not a guarantee. I think the biggest promise of this technology may be that it shows how many approaches there are to creating realistic 3D images. Some day we’re going to have lifelike real time holograms – there’s too many paths for them all to fail. Which is good news for those of us who have underlings we need to impress. Come my Singularity Hub interns, gaze upon my floating head and FEAR ME!

Wireframe 3D hologram of a Tie Fighter... Can't Breathe...Geek...Overload

Shinoda Lab uses ultrasound so you can feel holograms.

Called the Airborne Ultrasound Tactile Display, the specially calibrated ultrasound emitter gives you the impression of physical pressure at the location of a holographic object. Because you aren’t actually touching the hologram, there’s no decrease in the quality of the image. Unlike a traditional speaker, the ultrasound can be focused at a particular location, so you only feel pressure at a certain point. This precision allows AUTD to let you feel individual drops of virtual rain, a bouncing ball, or even a tiny animal running across your palm.

I think it is hilarious and awesome that a key component of  the Shinoda Lab setup is a remote control from the Nintendo Wii. Two wiimotes serve as IR sensors that track the movement of your hand in the hologram space. In order to see your hand, you have to have a tiny marker place on your finger that is very reflective to IR light. As far as hand-tracking goes, it’s a remarkably simple setup. There are some obvious limitations you can see from the video. The size of the hand isn’t well preserved in the virtual space (probably because only one part of the hand is tracked in IR). Still, I’m sure Nintendo is overjoyed with the inventiveness of the Shinoda Lab. Especially since Shinoda just exhibited AUTD at the SIGGRAPH conference in New Orleans.

The guys at Tokyo University are really knocking it out of the park these days. First they made super fast robot hands play baseball, now they could let us play catch with a virtual team. I applaud their innovation and am excited by how many different ways it can be applied. I mean, the AUTD seems custom fit to be integrated into Augmented Reality technology, haptics, and human-computer interfaces. How versatile can you get?

Interacting with visual object is going to be a big development in the fields of computing, gaming, and art. Just looking at the AUTD from the video you can see how they could be easily adapted into a multi-directional 3D setup. When that happens, the AUTD will go from a novelty to a tool that brings about full immersion virtual reality. In the meantime, I look forward to seeing more demonstrations of Tokyo University’s current setup, including its limitations and what it sounds like. Damn, this stuff is cool. I’m going to go get some wiimotes, lasers, and a subwoofer and see if I can’t  battle some Klingons.