holodeck, hello 'duck

my excuse for not bloggin' for ages is I've simply been feeling rotten. Headaches, bodyaches, explosive spotty nose, chest producing an endless panoply of green gunk blah blah. In other words- I've been better. The fact I seem to have passed it on to a fair number of people comes as scant comfort. It seems to have lasted ages- at least a week.

Christmas hol(ogram)s loom- with loads of school work to be done. A group presentation this week questioning why Lenticulars and holograms have only broken into "serious" artistic usage to a limited extent. To illustrate a point I shall be playing the brilliant Flashback on my recently purchased megadrive. Flashback is one of my favorite games ever on any console (Platform). It's like a mixture of Total Recall, Blade Runner and Running Man with a bit of Aliens thrown in. If that sounds too good to be true... it is. Too good. And it's true.

Made my first holograms proper last week. The subject matter was rather pedestrian- a few coins and a Yale key. Still it works quite well, and opens the door for more experimental stuff.

Since working in the realm of autostereoscopics a number of folks have asked me when we will be seeing those midair holographic intercoms popularised by starwars. My answer- I don't know. There are some fairly basic physical limitations with the nature of lightwhich prevent it. and the fact that powerful lasers have a tendency to fry stuff. Including eyeballs. There are a number of experiments being done- saw something interesting on youtube which involved mirrors spinning at immense speed. in fact by the magic of copying and pasting I can show you the very same video.

here.




there's still a fair bit of work to be done, but hopefully we'll be throwing virtual objects around a la minority report soon, in our lifetime anyhow... What about the wag who says- "they did it in star wars, why not now?" To him I say, that was a long time ago in a galaxy far far away...