
A multi-user hologram table - el_duderino
http://newatlas.com/hologram-tables-euclideon/50868/
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yathern
I have little faith in this company or approach to holograms. Euclideon has
shown off their voxel based renderer for years as something that will
revolutionize gaming and real-time production as we know it - but it has done
no such thing. It's certainly interesting tech.

The cheesy, clearly photoshopped teaser images here do nothing to inspire
confidence - and based on the technology they described - I don't believe it
would work the way it looks in the image. They were vague on the details of
the implementation - but from what I understand, it works like this. The table
has two images projected onto it per person - each in a different wavelength -
and the glasses filter out other images. Thus you have stereoscopy per person.
I'm not sure if this approach could make color holograms as shown - but I'll
give them the benefit of the doubt.

What this won't allow is holograms which protrude from the table. You can make
stuff go inside of the table - or seem like it's coming out when you are
directly above - but not hover over it as in the teaser images.

They also don't talk about the positional tracking technology other than:

> The computer knows where the glasses are. The glasses have some boxes with
> little microchips and microcomputers that we build on the side of them.

~~~
sigi45
I'm still wondering where the money is coming from. I would also like to play
around for years with this kind of technology.

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peatmoss
> Dell hopes that his tables will be used in workplaces for city planning as
> well as arcades.

As someone with a background in urban planning, these kinds of statements
always convince me that nobody knows what urban planning entails.

Funny enough, at community meetings, many planners like to avoid realistic
renderings of changes. For example if you want to give people an idea of what
sort of size buildings could have under a proposed upzone, you don't want them
fixated on the color of the brick facade in the rendering.

I can't really imagine a holographic display helping planning in any real
sense beyond getting school kids excited.

~~~
milesokeefe
It could be used for that exactly, getting the public interested in new
development projects. Not sure it would be worth the cost though.

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cryptozeus
I had worked on earlier model of Microsoft surface table. They had the same
pitch that these multi user multi touch devices will be used by education and
banking systems etc. they don't work simply because its not solving any
problem. Why would people go out of their way to learn new ways of designing,
developing and communication just so they can share their work in hologram?
What does it solve? Until this is answered AR and VR are not going anywhere.

~~~
milesokeefe
AR has huge business potential in any job that requires use of both of your
hands, especially for tasks where you’re moving around and don’t want to be
tied to a monitor.

I agree with you when it comes to jobs that are currently done with monitors
on desks.

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vbuwivbiu
Is it too late to rename these various stereoscopic systems to something other
than 'holograms' ? Because they're not holograms.

Holograms work by interference and have the property that when cut into pieces
each piece is a (dimmer and narrower FOV) copy of the whole.

Stereoscopic systems could be called 'stereograms' ?

~~~
throwaway2016a
The new startup marketting language...

Holograms = Augmented Reality

Hover Board = Self balancing wheeled vehicle

AI = algorithms, sometimes big data, rarely machine learning or neural
networks

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mhalle
Easy way to tell a faked 3D display: look for imagery lying along a line of
sight that doesn't intersect the display medium. For example, the dinosaur's
head and the tops of buildings stick out above the display's edges as seen
from the viewer's location in the video.

Objects may be in front or behind the display's surface, but the display
medium has to lie in front or behind every part of the object.

For all practical purposes, photons travel in straight lines, and require some
medium to create or redirect them. It is extremely unlikely that anyone will
suddenly discover an easy way to change that fact.

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pasta
So as I understand correctly this is the same as with 3D movies in cinema, but
now the computer knows where each glasses are and is changing the phase of the
light for each user.

Interesting tech and although the article is full of shopped images and a
video that doesn't tell a thing, this might actually work.

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gvoncheap
Holograms are just a terrible idea. I can see the use for AR in business,
services, and education. But as far as we can throw it, it's pretty useless
compared to video.

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sschueller
Total Vaporware. What does "Theoretical Atoms of Light" mean? and what are
"Small slip on sunglasses"?

~~~
jerf
Euclideon has a long history in this space of making relatively scammy claims
out of technology that may seem far out to the average person, but is actually
fairly bog-standard graphics techniques know by professionals in the field
that aren't used because of their crippling drawbacks in the applications that
people care about.

For instance, you can read this thread:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2837948](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2837948)
and bear in mind that 2213 days later, the skeptics in that thread have
basically been proved out by future results. (Although you can edit out the
people who misunderstand octtrees and argue about the storage requirements for
them.)

While we can't know what tech they're using for 100% certain, and they may
have put their own twists on it, the most likely underlying tech they are
referring to is sparse octtrees:
[https://stackoverflow.com/questions/985893/what-are-
sparse-v...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/985893/what-are-sparse-voxel-
octrees) They are a real data structure. It is fantastic for static content
and has amazing performance characteristics. However, if you are a programmer
who has ever done any tree-type stuff, even if you haven't done 3D graphics,
imagine trying to "animate" a single point by moving it in that structure. The
algorithm to do so is quite simple... it's just impossibly expensive because
of the staggering amount of tree traversal you must do. And due to the way the
octtree subdivides, you can't even win with a vague handwave at "caching",
though motivating that with math would take me longer than I have here. It
completely fails to scale to anything like what the world today considers 3D
graphics if you want any motion at all.

Further, there were other telltale signs that that was the technique they were
using, such as repeated cells in the rendered video that were clearly just
repeated cells in the octtree (a trivial elaboration to understand once you
understand the data structure). If you looked you could even see them being
aligned on powers of two.

Last I knew Euclideon had decided to change their focus to scanning high-
resolution 3D images of things like cathedrals and such. I thought that was
actually a good idea, it's a perfect fit for what their tech can actually do.
Perhaps doing real engineering work and producing a real product of real value
wasn't proving as lucrative as fraud. Certainly it's more _work_. They weren't
even trying with that press kit, as others observe the tech described is going
to be literally incapable of producing things that look like those concept
photos.

You'd think they'd at least change their name, at this point.

I'm also hoping the Euclideon Defense Squad is tired out at this point. (Well,
it's not really the Euclideon Defense Squad. It's really the Squad of People
Annoyed That Some People Claming Things Are Impossible, What If You're Wrong,
They Thought We'd Never Break The Sound Barrier, Didn't They? It just happens
to be that the Euclideon was the topic _du jour_. But that's a bit long. It
also tended to miss the fact that even if what they're describing is possible
that doesn't mean Euclideon are the people to do it....) They're scammers.
It's pretty much proved at this point, I don't even feel like that's a libel
risk. They've not produced what they said they will in the past, and if this
is their current focus, they will continue to not produce it. Since what they
were trying to produce in the past was impossible, their failure to produce it
was no great surprise. This table they're describing may be possible, it just
won't be as impressive as they are promising. Possibly useful, though. Unless
they really were stupid enough to tie it to their voxel technology, in which
case _awhoop_ there goes most of the use cases again.

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brainary
The VO dude sounds like the "Point Cloud Data" dude from Unlimited Details.

Heck the video even shows the same type of scenes...

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codesnik
why all the "designers" who talk about awesome holograms continue to draw
their imagined devices like they can display something outside of the
boundaries of their screens?

also, interestingengineering.com is a cancer, people who write/edit their
articles have understanding of the world on level of three years old children.

