Futuristic Computing ... In The PRESENT ! - TechBum

Remember the scenes in Iron Man and Iron Man 2 where Tony Stark is able to project computerized images and data in mid-air – and then manipulate them with his hands?

That technology is now a hell of a lot closer to reality.

Let’s see what all do we need to achieve this type of computing and projection capabilities.

First of all we require Gesture Control, to manipulate stuff with hands. So what is Gesture control?

Gesture recognition is a topic in computer science and language technology with the goal of interpreting human gestures via mathematical algorithms. Gestures can originate from any bodily motion or state but commonly originate from the face or hand.

Gesture recognition can be seen as a way for computers to begin to understand human body language, thus building a richer bridge between machines and humans than primitive text user interfaces or even GUIs (graphical user interfaces), which still limit the majority of input to keyboard and mouse.

This could potentially make conventional input devices such as mouse, keyboards and even touch-screens redundant.

One of the biggest examples of Gesture recognition device is the Kinect. Kinect is a motion sensing input device by Microsoft for the Xbox 360 video game console and Windows PCs. Based around a webcam-style add-on peripheral for the Xbox 360 console, it enables users to control and interact with the Xbox 360 without the need to touch a game controller, through a natural user interface using gestures and spoken commands.

Though Kinect is officially for Gaming but it can be brought to a variety of uses to serve you according to your needs with just a little programming. Since Kinect covers whole body movements it is not able to recognize your finger movements very accurately.

-->

Apart from Kinect there’s yet another device called The Leap, which  is a simple box about the size of a flash drive, and it just sits on your desk near your monitor. Just connect our device and instantly get 8 cubic feet of awesome, intuitive, 3D interaction space. When you make gestures inside this box, the Leap can track them.

All you need are your hands. Or a pencil Or a paintbrush. Or whatever you’d work with in real life. In short what we have currently is Gesture control but with a SCREEN.

So imagine yourself modeling 3D images in air just like molding them like clay. Sounds fun , isn’t it ?

Well, we don’t yet have a perfect way to project 3D images in mid-air without a screen, if at all you thought you can play around with it just as you are holding and molding an object in real life !

This is possible with the 3D Holographic Projection Technology. Ok, so what is

Holography? Holography is a technique which enables three-dimensional images to be made. It involves the use of a laser, interference, diffraction, light intensity recording and suitable illumination of the recording. The image changes as the position and orientation of the viewing system changes in exactly the same way as if the object were still present, thus making the image appear three-dimensional.

Holography may be better understood via an examination of its differences from ordinary photography.

A photograph is a two-dimensional representation that can only reproduce a rudimentary three-dimensional effect, whereas the reproduced viewing range of a hologram adds many more depth perception cues that were present in the original scene. These cues are recognized by the human brain and translated into the same perception of a three-dimensional image as when the original scene might have been viewed.

3D holographic projection technology clearly has a big future ahead.

Ultimately, holographic projectors may become sufficiently small to be incorporated into future generation cell phones. If you know there was once a rumor about the new iphone 5 having a holographic Keyboard !

Holographic techniques are being used for three dimensional (3-D) rendering of medical pictures including MRI and CT pictures. Medical holotechnology imaging can enable doctors to test the insertion of medical instruments into an artificially constructed, three-dimensional version of the surgical field before the operation.

A holographic memory device that can store as much as five gigabytes could replace flash memory for many usages. It would be a boon to handheld machines like PDAs and smart phones. Next generation smart phones may use holotechnology applied science for data storage and display projection. For memory, holographic information recording and playback could significantly increase the memory capacity of phones. For display, holotechnology projection can show images, unconstrained by the tiny size of a handheld device.

It sounds a lot like a wacky dream, but don't be surprised if within our lifetime you find yourself discarding your plasma and LCD sets in exchange for a holographic 3-D television that can put Cristiano Ronaldo in your living room or bring you face-to-face with life-sized versions of your gaming heroes.

 Combining these technologies could help you become a real life Tony Stark ! :)