One of the most enduring and lasting sci-fi moments of the big screen – R2-D2 beaming a 3D image of Princess Leia into thin air in “Star Wars” – which is very close to the facts and reality and this will be the gratitude to the smallest of screens: dust-like particles.
Scientists now find out and figured out how to manipulate nearly unseen specks which is now in the air and how this can be used properly in order to create 3D images which are said to be more realistic and clearer than holograms.
This report is published in the Wednesday’s journal Nature which is actually the study done by the main author of the book, Daniel Smalley, stated that this is the new technology is “printing something in space, just erasing it very quickly.”
In this case, scientists already made and created a small butterfly that is appearing to dance on a finger and an image of a graduate student copy and imitating the Leia in the Star Wars scene.
Even with all sorts of holograms which we generally use, this is the new technique that is closest to replicating that Star Wars scene. Die With Me App allows you chat only at 5 percent Battery
“The way they do it is really cool,” the professor of the University of Rochester, Curtis Broadbent, who wasn’t part of the study but still he provided such a hard work for this competing technology.
“You can have a circle of people stand around it and each person would be able to see it from their own perspective. And that’s not possible with a hologram.”
Watch Volumetric Display Tech Projects Onto Thin Air
The tiny specks are controlled with laser light, which is very akin to the fictional tractor beam from “Star Trek,” stated by Smalley, an electrical engineering professor at Brigham Young University.
Though, it was very different science fiction movie which is consists of an idea or concept: The scene in the movie “Iron Man” when the Tony Stark character appeared in a holographic glove.
But it will not happen in real life because Stark’s arm can be disrupting the image.
Regarding this holograms this type of technology – technically called volumetric display – is like shifting from a two-dimensional printer which is of the three-dimensional printer, Smalley said. Holograms can be seen in the eyes of people in the three-dimensional, but “all of the magic is happening on a 2D surface,” Smalley stated.
The key is trapping which is moving the particles around potential disruptions – like Tony Stark’s arm – so the “arm is no longer in the way,” Smalley told.
At the start, Smalley thought gravity can make the particles fall which is making it impossible to sustain for an image, but the laser light energy can alter the air pressure in a way to keep them aloft, he also told.
Other versions of volumetric display use larger “screens” and “you can’t poke your finger into it because your fingers would get chopped off,” said Massachusetts Institute of Technology Professor V. Michael Bove, but he wasn’t part of the study team and Smalley was the mentor.
The device Smalley uses is about one-and-a-half a time which is very akin to the size of a children’s lunchbox, he stated.
So far the projections which are very tiny, but with more work and multiple beams, Smalley expected to have bigger projections.
This method could one day be use which is to help guide medical procedures – and for entertainment, Smalley said. It’s still years away from using it as daily.
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