3D Laser Images

[avatarxprime]

I was watching a National Geographics thing on fireworks and saw an interesting display where some scientists in Japan were working on developing laser projections that could be shown in thin air to create 3D images. Unfortunately I could find no video of the stuff online, but I did find a short article on it.

A joint research group of Burton Inc., Photonics Research Institute of the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) and Hamamatsu Photonics K.K. announced that it has succeeded in enhancing the performance of the spatial 3D display technology that can stereoscopically display video images by forming flashpoints in the air.

The points are created by focusing laser light and utilizing, at the focal point, the plasma emission phenomenon of oxygen and nitrogen molecules in the air. Burton and AIST had previously announced the joint development of this technology with Keio University in February 2006.

This time, the technology has been improved to display 1,000 dot/sec flashpoints by employing Hamamatsu Photonics' proprietary "high-peak-power all-solid-state femtosecond laser system."

The group reports that the new setup can provide smoother images. The focal point of the laser light is scanned by a 3D scanning system. The luminance of the generated plasma and the contrast ratio can be controlled by the pulse number per dot.

Burton, AIST and Hamamatsu Photonics are planning to further enhance the performance of the spatial 3D display technology.

Meanwhile, a joint research group of Keio University, Erio, AIST, the University of Tokyo and Dentsu Inc. will conduct a research project entitled "Technology to Display 3D Contents into Free Space" (Team leader: Hideo Saito, professor, Keio University).

The research project is in the research area called "Foundation of Technology Supporting the Creation of Digital Media Contents" (Research supervisor: Hiroshi Harashima, Professor, the University of Tokyo) promoted as Core Research for Evolutional Science and Technology (CREST) led by Japan Science and Technology Agency.

The group plans to focus on the development of hardware technology for the spatial 3D display and content technology as well as the research on market creation.

According to the Koei University website, at least the english parts of it, they began working on this technology in 2006. Scroll down to the title "Technology to Display 3D Contents into Free Space." The images are very simple for now, but it will be interesting to see what further developments will come from this.

[Memnon]

Cool - this is like older holographic technology using a different medium to project on.
It will be very interesting to see what kind of resolution this gets, and what applications it will be used for.
Perhaps the most useful thing that could come out of this is 3D medical displays like in Firefly.

[zircon]

There are two versions of their 3d plasma projector.

Here's an article describing the advances done in 2007. New projector

And here's a movie of the old one. Movie

As you can hear it creates a very annoying sound.