

Japanese Scientists Create Touchable Holograms - wiks
http://english.ntdtv.com/ntdtv_en/ns_asia/2009-09-16/163021253061.html

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todayiamme
I am baffled to see this story up again. In fact, this was introduced at
SIGGRAPH a year ago
[http://www.alab.t.u-tokyo.ac.jp/~siggraph/09/TouchableHologr...](http://www.alab.t.u-tokyo.ac.jp/~siggraph/09/TouchableHolography/SIGGRAPH09-TH.html)

I remember this because I must have jumped around for a week after seeing that
video.

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tocomment
What do you mean by jumping around?

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julsonl
Probably jumping for joy, as any star wars/trek fan should.

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pigbucket
Alternatively, if you jumped around energetically enough (like a Klingon, say)
you might generate the acoustic radiation pressure needed to make your own
touchable hologram. Of course the two theories are not mutually exclusive.

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awongh
How many months until someone comes up with an application for this in the
adult industry? As with home video and web streaming video, could be another
technology accelerated by porn....

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acangiano
I'm not sure why you are being downvoted. There are plenty of non-pornographic
applications, but the porn industry could very well accelerate the adoption of
this technology. It won't happen in months, no, but I can see holographic porn
becoming a reality within 10 years or so.

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noahlt
"Up until now, holography has been for the eyes only, and if you'd try to
touch it, your hand would go right through. But now we have a technology that
also adds the sensation of touch to holograms."

Clearly I missed something here -- what are they using to create the
holograms?

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sesqu
Curved mirrors. So not movie holograms; you can't put anything behind the
projections. That makes the illusion very fragile at some touch surfaces. The
sensation technology has the same projective limitation, so you can't have
anything else opposite to your hand.

Together, they could give a reasonable hemisphere of touch and sight. However,
the touch technology is separate and will work with any hologram in a
controlled space.

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anonymous236
Touchless door and light switches appears to be used extensively in Canadian
hospitals. Without any holograms though.

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MichaelApproved
An isolated light switch on a wall is easy to produce with a sensor and
marking showing where to wave your hand. A panel full of buttons and switches
is another thing altogether.

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gdl
I clicked expecting this to be one of those terribly misleading science
headlines, but this actually sounds really cool.

I wonder how much this can be tuned to create a variety of "materials", or if
it's limited to a simple novelty sensation like making your fingertips vibrate
a bit when you touch it.

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cmelbye
Yeah, this reminded me of Blackberry putting buttons behind their touchscreens
to make them click, or the cheap touchscreen feature phones that vibrate
whenever you tap something. Still very cool in this application though.

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seldo
Soon we will all know the joy of accidentally creating a real-life professor
Moriarty who we have to defeat using only our powers of deductive reasoning!

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basicxman
I don't like how they call it "the sensation of touch," when it's really just
the illusion of touch.

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gjm11
> The technology consists of software that uses ultrasonic waves to create
> pressure on the hand of a user "touching" the projected hologram.

How do you suppose putting pressure on the hand creates the illusion of touch,
other than by the sensation of touch? Would anything, for you, count as the
sensation (and not merely the illusion) of touch, other than having an actual
solid object there?

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basicxman
My point is you wouldn't actually 'feel' it, therefore you wouldn't get back
the 'sensation' of touching something. Yes you would _see_ a response, but you
would not _feel_ the response. Ergo, illusion.

EDIT: For your enjoyment, <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultrasonic_sensor>,
you simply do not feel ultrasonic sound waves.

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jules
No, the whole point of the thing is that you _can_ feel it (or at least they
claim you can).

