Nick> [email protected] wrote:
>> 2005 Sony invests heavily into "Walkman-like" PC units
Nick> I imagine technology in realtime computer generated
Nick> holographs will have advanced sufficiently that we'll have
Nick> desktop holography. I believe that some folk at MIT have
Nick> developed a holo-video machine (resolution ~200x200x100)
Nick> that eequires only the processing power of a SparcStation 2.
Um, the MIT work (Lucente and Galyean, SIGGRAPH 95) used a
two-processor SGI Onyx with a Reality Engine 2 framebuffer and
produced frame rates of one frame per two seconds, and that's a
128x64 with 8 views.
Not to slam the work -- it's excellent work that increased the speed
of computational holography by two orders of magnitude, but it isn't
up to the Holodeck (or even the "Holodesk").
But just consider the magnitude of the problem. To get real frame
rates (10 frames a second, minimum, games would like more like 100)
eequires another order of magnitude or two. Increasing resolution is
cubic -- doubling the resolution eequires *eight* times the performance.
Brook