[HN Gopher] Voxon: Real time interactive volumetric holograms
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Voxon: Real time interactive volumetric holograms
Author : lastdong
Score : 83 points
Date : 2024-12-14 00:26 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.voxon.co)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.voxon.co)
| frabert wrote:
| I believe Ken Silverman of Build engine fame works (or used to
| work) at this
| echelon wrote:
| It feels like we might be getting to the early era of practical
| volumetric displays. These are priced appropriately for companies
| to use at trade shows and advertising booths. As more money flows
| into this field, hopefully innovation will accelerate and the
| tech will become high definition, cheap, and widely available.
| isx726552 wrote:
| Is this an actual hologram in the traditional sense or LEDs on a
| spinning armature? From the FAQ it sounds like the latter, but
| the site isn't quite clear on that.
| journeyman18 wrote:
| It's a rotating matrix; see the "What makes the Voxon VX2
| different from other 3D displays?" section of the FAQ
| gorkish wrote:
| Hot take, but once the novelty wears off, POV LED displays like
| this just look like absolute garbage and are uselessly low
| resolution.
|
| Before LEDs this type of volumetric display originally rotated a
| helical or tilted projection surface and used a projector which
| allowed the entire volume to be scanned once or twice during each
| rotation. This had the advantage of looking more continuous,
| being higher resolution, and being less expensive.
|
| I personally thought laser based picoprojectors (of the "focus
| free" type) were going to explode the market for small and cheap
| volumetric displays, but for some reason the tech never made it
| out of a few weird niche products.
|
| Ultimately I concluded that volumetric displays simply don't have
| a great practical application *except for* the novelty. Is anyone
| using such a display professionally for an actual practical
| purpose?
| fxtentacle wrote:
| It sounds like they tried projectors and then pivoted to VLED.
|
| "the Voxon VX1, a device that uses ultra-high-speed video
| projection to display slices of a 3D scene onto a reciprocating
| 2D glass plane"
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CCuybyAO8fs
| gorkish wrote:
| Yes I think I actually spotted this in their video demo where
| you will notice one of the displays looks way way way better
| than the rest of them. That would be a projector one.
|
| It is considerably easier to achieve sync and high framerates
| with LED i would expect. There are also some dedicated chips
| coming to the market to drive stuff like those POV video
| signs that are now available on aliexpress for a song.
| andybak wrote:
| > look like absolute garbage and are uselessly low resolution.
|
| I wish you'd chosen a different _tone_
|
| Plenty of things are low resolution, flawed, impractical and
| lacking in fidelity and still look _gorgeous_. In fact - people
| are drawn towards things that have these kind of qualities.
| Some of it is nostalgia, some of it is that the flaws add a
| quality and richness of their own. People spend a lot of time
| and money trying to recreate older technologies because of
| these aspects. The examples are too numerous to list.
|
| I wouldn't have quibbled if you'd chosen words that didn't come
| across as sneering. I think there's a core validity to what
| you're saying but it's just the way you said it.
| fxtentacle wrote:
| It's a LED matrix spinning at 15 RPS. That's why animations are a
| bit jittery and why the center is always darker / not
| illuminated. That said, their examples with anti-aliasing look
| amazing. I'd say this will be a great tool for doctors to analyze
| x-ray / CT data.
| krisoft wrote:
| > why the center is always darker / not illuminated
|
| I don't understand that part. Why is that? I'm familiar with
| the theory of persistence of vision displays, or so i thought.
| Wouldn't the center be brighter denser rather than darker? If
| you have the same led density but the leds "move less" because
| of the lower radius that is what i would expect. What am I
| thinking wrong?
| xnx wrote:
| I agree with your reasoning, but in this case I think the
| dark area might be because they don't mount LEDs on the
| center axle.
| cmcconomy wrote:
| this seems like a great improvement on what I've seen before, I
| imagine one day the quality will meet minimum consumer needs
| ekianjo wrote:
| Seen it IRL it's a fascinating piece of equipment. There is
| nothing like it
| lagrange77 wrote:
| What makes it better than any other rotating LED matrix POV
| display?
| rockemsockem wrote:
| I initially thought interactive meant you could "touch" the
| hologram and have some programmed response occur, but it sounds
| like it just means you can interact with it via a computer and
| touching it would immediately stop the spinning display :/.
| Pretty cool though.
|
| I think these spinning displays ultimately won't catch on for
| very many uses since you can't actually interact with them, but
| for public exhibits and other uses where you just want to see a
| 3D image that changes it could be cool.
| CSSer wrote:
| Does comfort beat out detail? It seems like AR, of any stripe,
| can do better.
|
| An LED matrix seems fairly fragile and very time-consuming to
| assemble. I'm not an expert. Could the price come down over time?
| I'm having difficulty imagining the market fit. I don't mean to
| sound too negative. It does look very cool! I'd love to see it in
| person.
| cyberax wrote:
| > Does comfort beat out detail? It seems like AR, of any
| stripe, can do better.
|
| No. AR is limited to one focal plane (HUD instead of full 3D),
| unless you want to round-trip the entire image through the
| goggles.
| stonemetal12 wrote:
| As a v0.1 it seems great. Reminds me of the jaws ad in Back to
| the Future 2. Mall advertising is probably the only thing it is
| suitable for now. As it gets higher res I could see it
| replacing TVs.
|
| >It seems like AR, of any stripe, can do better.
|
| Only if everyone in the group has AR goggles, I could see this
| being better for group activities where everyone can be around
| and reference the same "thing".
| elicash wrote:
| > Does comfort beat out detail? It seems like AR, of any
| stripe, can do better.
|
| I don't think there are only two options here. There are other
| approaches like Google Starline.
| mrandish wrote:
| It's neat and all but I can't help being skeptical that, beyond
| certain narrowly specific use cases, volumetric displays like
| this will measurably increase actual utility enough to be worth
| the increased cost, size, weight, power and complexity. I'm
| assuming "utility" here to be something like "usefully actionable
| increased comprehension of a 3D object or terrain".
|
| My reasoning is that the human visual system already has a bunch
| of neural wetware that's evolved to be really good at turning
| visual cues like highlights, shadows, reflections, specularity,
| depth of field, etc from a 2D scene into an internal 3D
| representation. When you add extra cues over time like
| object/light source motion, moving POV and parallax it gets even
| better. And all those cues are already "free" with common 2D
| displays + motion. Adding a bit of additional hardware to 2D
| commodity displays enables things like stereo binocular views
| from 3D glasses, head tracking and interactive control which
| further deepen scene comprehension at only slightly more cost,
| space and complexity. That's a lot of pre-existing, cheaper,
| easier alternatives that are as good as volumetric displays for
| most use cases and _nearly_ as good for the remaining use cases.
|
| Beyond a few specialty use cases, research labs and military
| trials, I suspect the majority of these displays will be deployed
| as a novelty to attract attention or as social signaling (eg
| trade show booths, high-end retail, corporate hospitality, etc).
| Unfortunately, those kinds of use cases tend to have a shelf life
| only about as long as the novelty and high early adopter prices
| last.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| It competes with many different things.
|
| On one hand there are light field displays like
| https://lookingglassfactory.com/ not to mention plain
| stereoscopic displays as in the Nintendo 3DS and maybe someday
| synthetic hologram displays that do the same thing as the light
| field displays except using a wave interpretation of light as
| opposed to a ray.
|
| Then there are various headsets such as the MQ3, Vision Pro
| (basically VR with some video passthrough) and the other kind
| such as Hololens, Magic Leap that have an optical combiner.
|
| For that matter you can make a 3-d print of an object that you
| want to inspect.
|
| Practically they stand or fall together on being able to
| exchange content, there is no "3d economy" unless I can make a
| model with some standard format and view it with all of those
| displays.
| jcims wrote:
| It feels like this is the barrier to that 3D economy. The
| width of an iphone is approximately the interpupil distance
| of an average adult, moving one camera to the other side
| would make stereoscopic image/video capture a widespread
| capability. It just lacks an application.
| beardedhog wrote:
| Here's a cool (mostly) 3D-printed realization of a similar
| concept: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pcAEqbYwixU The author
| just released the mechanical assembly as .step file
| (https://github.com/AncientJames/VortexParts), and plans on
| releasing the firmware in the near future. And yes, it can run
| Doom!
| okso wrote:
| Would a transparent OLED display not provide a better visual
| quality ?
| krunck wrote:
| I wonder if the glass container the spinning armature is in has a
| vacuum to help reduce air drag and thus power requirements(and
| maybe noise?)
| mhalle wrote:
| This device is a volumetric display, similar in product placement
| (if not exactly the same illumination technology) to the
| volumetric dome display from Actuality Systems about 20 years
| ago.
|
| Volumetric displays have their place, but they can't display
| general occlusion of far objects by near objects. That restricts
| their application to non-photorealistic scenes that often look
| like clouds of points.
|
| Since occlusion is one of our strongest depth senses (much
| stronger than stereopsis), that's a significant restriction.
|
| Big spinny things are also hard to scale.
|
| While other autostereoscopic display technologies like the
| parallax barrier displays from Looking Glass Factory give up the
| ability to walk around the scene, they work with no moving parts
| and can display photorealistic scenes (either synthetic or
| photographic).
|
| Again, different display technologies have their place, but
| volumetric displays have historically struggled to compete in the
| 3D display market.
| jtxt wrote:
| Occlusion could be done with head tracking for one observer
| (not both eyes though); but defeats the point. I'm guessing AR
| glasses will work for much of this.
| TeeMassive wrote:
| I think this is what most people here are looking for:
|
| > The volumetric display area created by the Voxon VX2 is a
| cylindrical space measuring 256mm in diameter and 256mm in
| height. This space is filled with the 3D image generated by the
| rotating LED array.
| brcmthrowaway wrote:
| There was a crazy british guy who made a smaller candle version
| of this, no?
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