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.
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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 ! :)
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