3D Holograms and the Potential for Holographic Display

Dialogue

Written by Matt Ball Sunday, 21 June 2009 20:59

Dialogue-Interview-Interview: 3D Holograms and the Potential for Holographic Display

Most technologies to visualize and manipulate three-dimensional models create an environment that’s just two and a half dimensions. Holographic imaging technology promises to provide a display that projects an image that can be manipulated in the full three dimensions. One company that’s working diligently to develop this technology is Zebra Imaging. V1 Editor Matt Ball spoke with Michael Klug, CTO and co-founder, to discuss the progress and potential for this technological breakthrough for geospatial visualization.

V1: I was reading how Zebra Imaging had its start in a research lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Can you provide some details on how the technology made the jump from an academic setting?

Klug: I was one of the founders of the company back in 1996, coming out of MIT’s Media Lab. The Media Lab is part of the architecture department, and that’s where the holographic display began as a way to communicate design. The architecture link came from a group that predated the Media Lab called the Architecture Machine Group, and it was founded in the early 1970s. The concept was to use the computers for doing building design.

Holography is one medium that was being developed there because it’s such a visual medium. It’s useful for a variety of visualization applications including CAD, and not just buildings, but vehicles and whatever you can model in 3D in the computer. Whatever you can digitize in 3D, you can portray holographically. Our interest here has been focused mostly on geospatial information.

V1: What is the display medium for these holograms?

Klug: The physical film holograms that we’ve been producing for years are just that, they are a piece of hardcopy that represents the true three-dimensional nature of the data when illuminated with a light. When you shine a light on them at the right angle you can reconstruct a three-dimensional image. They’re created with digital data so we never need a physical object in hand. We can do it all with computer-generated information or computer digitized information.

We produce the film holograms as a product, and we’ve done that since our beginning back in ’96. We produce them as a service where people send us data and then we use our machines to produce physical holograms. We also have been selling what we call imagers. The imagers are like laser printers, except we don’t deposit ink down on the substrate. The imager “burns” the holographic pattern into the volume of the film, like a DVD writer. You can attach an imager to your computer system and using your CAD software and a plug-in, produce a hologram from that.

The other half of what we’re working on here is a dynamic 3D display to portray moving three-dimensional images that occupy space above and/or below the surface of the table or surface in front of you. The imagery literally occupies the space and you can run your hands through it - somewhat like the over-used concept of Princess Leia’s message in Star Wars, only without violating the laws of physics.

The idea is that you have this photonic image or light-created image that is floating above the surface of the table, and you can interact with it and update it, ideally, in real time. That’s a very challenging task, and there’s a lot of information in a hologram. We have to compute that information very rapidly, and we also have to create a unique display medium to manipulate and control light. That’s been a development program for the company for the last five years.

Those are the two product lines within Zebra Imaging, hardcopy images and the dynamic display, and of course they’re interrelated.

V1: What are some of the benefits of the 3D display?

Klug: The one thing that we’re all born with is the ability to see in 3D. I believe, the more information that you can show in that way, the more rapidly and accurately the communication occurs, and therefore, hopefully the more efficient the collaboration between people that must interpret and act on the information.

The more that you can present information remotely and in an accurate and very clear way to people who are very distant from each other, but happen to be working together, the more you promote sustainability. There’s less travel involved, and therefore less burning of fossil fuels. It promotes remote presentation, but it also promotes the ability to work interculturally. 3D visual display is a common language for all humans.

V1: We’re very interested in 3D, focused primarily in urban areas because we realized that’s the place where we can reduce our impacts on the planet. We’re delving into digital city models and 3D as a means to understand holistically what’s going on.

Klug: Urban environments are more efficient with regard to environmental impact, but they’re also very complex and they tend to be very three-dimensional in nature. As we learn to use that space more efficiently and develop building and transportation methodologies, the need to be able to model volumetrically in 3D becomes critical.

Whether you’re doing that with hardcopy film, like we do today, to help folks navigate in places like Baghdad or whether we do it with cities like New York or any other large city where there are subway systems and utilities and the airspace is just as important as the physical space. All that needs to be visualized in 3D, and I think we’re very much aligned with that trend through our technology development.

V1: You mentioned that the architectural space is where the technology got its start. Is architecture a key market for your products?

Klug: On the static hardcopy side, it is where we’re focusing our commercial efforts right now. We’re working on getting our static images into the workflow of the architecture community as we think that they really need time to look at the structures that they’re designing and share their building plans in this media with key stakeholders.

On the dynamic side, it’s something that we’re certainly considering among all of the many different visualization areas. The issue is that once you initiate a new technology, there are definite cost issues associated with that. We want to make sure that we can provide a product that can meet not only the utility required for architecture, but also the cost point. So, architecture might not be the first market we would jump into, but it will certainly be a market that we will enter into eventually.

Many design problems can be solved using our dynamic technology to help an architect imagine a structure. And once better tools become available so you can actually design interactively with the display, then we think we’ll be a big player in that space.

V1: How do you envision interacting with a dynamic 3D display?

Klug: In the future you should be able to interact with the model directly so that you are designing on the display itself in 3D through 3D. Instead of using a mouse to draw a shape or a cube that gets represented on a 2D screen like we do today, you might actually use some other kind of device to trace out a cube in a spatial volume over one of our displays and have it appear there.

This will allow the design process to move more smoothly, quickly and efficiently. As kids, we all grew up playing with blocks and our whole world was 3D in front of us, and I think we never lose that paradigm in our minds. I think people have to learn how to deal with these other tools that we create, like 2D representations on 2D displays, but for intrinsically 3D tasks like building or landscape design or city planning, designing in 3D is definitely the preference.

V1: That’s exciting to think about. What kind of timeframe will it be until this dynamic 3D display technology comes to market?

Klug: We’ve been developing this over about the last five years and we’ve created some prototypes that are fairly large, on the scale of one meter diagonal. The tradeoffs are being explored now and all the different technical components associated with those displays -- viewing angle, resolution, brightness, how fast they need to update, etc. All these things need to be taken into consideration for any particular application.

We’re trying to be very methodical and targeting certain applications that may have less sensitivity to the things we can do more easily today. As we evolve the technology, we want to eventually approach that vision that I just articulated where it’s so interactive that you’re literally drawing in space using one of these displays.

V1: Is it the vision of Zebra Imaging to create a 3D visualization medium without goggles or any of the other trappings of some current 3D display technologies?

Klug: That’s absolutely a critical part. Zebra’s mission is to create a visual sense of presence for a variety of different applications. And the visual sense of presence must be created without the need for glasses, goggles, and headgear of any kind and certainly without any physical discomfort on the part of the people who are experiencing the image.

A lot of people have a hard time looking at 3D in its various media forms today. And the one thing that we have designed into our technology is the ability to produce an image that truly occupies physical volume of space, so that you don’t ever feel any discomfort when you’re looking at this image. I don’t want to use too much technical jargon, but all the depth cues are being satisfied with our display. You can view it from any direction and the perspective is correct as you move around it. Objects that are closer to you appear opaque and objects that are further behind you are occluded, they’re blocked out or just obscured by objects that are in front of them.

All these things are very important for us as humans - processing displayed imagery as related to how we see our physical world. That visual sense of presence really kind of sums it up, that’s exactly what we’re doing. We want to get to the point where what you are seeing is indiscernible from reality, and that, of course, is a huge task. We anticipate that will take some time, but we’re making some great headway.

V1: There’s certainly a growing interest in 3D right now.

Klug: You do hear a lot about 3D, particularly with all the 3D movies out today. We’ve tried to go to lengths to make sure that we’re soberly focused on all of the things that are required for you to have a good, accurate, comfortable, and effective 3D experience when you’re viewing our displays. And I think that’s different sometimes when you go to movies and you have to wear the glasses.

You can’t have those glasses on and be talking to another person while you’re looking at this display in front of you. That’s an important part of effective and efficient communication. It’s not just looking at the display, but looking at the people sitting across the table from you while you’re looking at the display. That’s a key component of what we focus on here.

V1: It seems that the ability to capture 3D, using such technology as aerial LIDAR, is coming along quite rapidly. Do you see the capture and visualization of 3D in software to be in lockstep to your ability to display that information?

Klug: It’s hard to say that we actually had a product with broad, diverse utility before the advent of LIDAR, because the 3D content that was available was limited only to digital data that was created on CAD workstations for instance or using very esoteric digitization tools. But LIDAR is now becoming more or less pervasive, and all of a sudden there’s a lot of 3D data.

V1: You indicated that geospatial is a strong focus of yours. Do you have partnerships with specific GIS companies, and are you working to visualize specific software outputs?

Klug: The majority of our work on geospatial has been focused to date on the military applications, and the software that are being used for providing that data tend to be fairly niche-oriented software packages. GlobalMapper is a example of a GIS tool that allows you to take LIDAR data that is acquired from airborne LIDAR scanners, convert it into a mesh and then select and “chip out” areas of interest for hologram production.

On the architectural side, we’re trying to focus on creating solutions that work with Autodesk products like Revit, 3D Studio Max and Maya. And of course Google’s SketchUp as well, which is one of the first tools people jump to these days because of its simplicity and accessibility.

Over the last six months or so we’ve been working to create APIs to make it easy to make holograms and to integrate with third party software packages with our dynamic display as well. We work to portray ourselves as being indifferent to what type of software, what type of 3D data comes in. We aspire to be a pervasive display technology, like the LCD screens included on most computers today. The display is just something that’s converting electrical signals to light, and that’s really where our focus is. We do realize that it’s important to provide at least some integration examples so that people can begin to understand how straightforward it is, and how effective it is.