

VoxieBox Displays 3D Images Just Like R2D2’s Message from Princess Leia - mortenjorck
http://techcrunch.com/2015/05/06/voxiebox-displays-3d-images-just-like-r2d2s-message-from-princess-leia/

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nl
I know (and worked with) the founder and inventors, who are based in Adelaide.

It's a real system, works just like the videos. They have been working on this
for years, since at least 2008.

Well done Will and Gav!

Plenty more videos available from
[https://youtu.be/hi1UiGr6Iow](https://youtu.be/hi1UiGr6Iow)

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munk
Thanks Nick!

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misnome
I don't think R2D2 was projecting inside a little box.

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khabaal
Correct, i also first thought that the image was somehow floating in the air.
The fact that there is a box around it makes this much less interesting.

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xwintermutex
FYI, Ken Silverman [1] is involved in this project.

[1]:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_Silverman](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_Silverman)
(he wrote the Build engine, which powers Duke Nukem 3D and other games)

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bottled_poe
It looks amazing - almost too good to be true. The low lighting in the video
make me feel like there is some kind of trickery happening here. I don't find
it is surprising that their indiegogo campaign has been started without
revealing technical details. It all just makes me a bit suspicious about the
technology... I would love to be told otherwise.

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greendestiny
It's definitely real. I've seen it, and no doubt so have many many others. As
someone else here speculated it's a transparent screen moving up and down over
a projector. It's pretty cool and worked in a reasonably light environment.

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bobajeff
That doesn't sound as impressive as a thin-air holographic projection.

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greendestiny
I suggest you stick with your current thin-air holographic solution if you
have one :)

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TazeTSchnitzel
Well, this one _literally_ does it with thin-air:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KfVS-
npfVuY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KfVS-npfVuY)

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TheLoneWolfling
That has minor issues. Such as ozone not being good for you. Ditto, lasers
powerful enough to ionize air. Also, the noise created.

Still intriguing though!

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munk
Will from Voxon here. Thanks for the interest. I'm happy to answer your
questions if you have any.

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yiyus
Eventually, will this work "out of the box"?

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ilaksh
Of course not. But its also not reasonable to expect that.

Does your TV work outside of your TV?

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DanBC
My tv doesn't claim to work outside the tv. This title ("displays 3D images
just like R2D2") does.

Still, it is amazing. This is something that makes me feel like I'm living in
the future.

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TazeTSchnitzel
It's not actually a new technique, this. You have a transparent screen (or
LEDs or what have you) and move it up and down very quickly, and your
persistence of vision makes it look like a single image. Just as a 1D line of
dots becomes a 2D image by spinning it (you've all seen those LED fans[0], or
heard of John Logie Baird's televisions), so too does a 2D matrix of dots
become a 3D image by moving it vertically.

I assume what's new here is that the VoxieBox does a particularly good job of
it.

[0]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F_1X6M0PqG4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F_1X6M0PqG4)

Edit: Here's a YouTube video of another device using a similar technique,
except it's layering LED fans!

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ey-
eO-H2_Mk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ey-eO-H2_Mk)

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DanBC
If you can show it doing Minecraft you'll get a lot of interest.

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astazangasta
Hmm the purple excited me for a second. I spent a while in my twenties and
thinking about this, and one of the possibilities I came up with was 2-photon
excitation of nitrogen to produce fluorescence - which would be purple. With
two lasers you could draw a purple dot at any point in air. No idea if this
would work, of course.

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TazeTSchnitzel
Something along those lines has been done successfully (ionising air):
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KfVS-
npfVuY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KfVS-npfVuY)

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otibom
I would be interested in reading more details about the technology. How does
it work? How much power does it need? What makes manufacturing expensive? Can
you make it bigger (holodeck sized)? Does it track the user's head position
somehow or does it work for N users simultaneously?

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ealexhudson
If you look at the images, they look very much like stacked planes. I'm
guessing - and it's a guess - that there is some largely-transparent device
which can generate light on points on a plane, and that it is being rapidly
moved up and down like a piston head, creating a persistence of vision display
much like LEDs on a bike wheel.

The low-light conditions the pictures are taken in support that I think - it
might be that the "points on a plane" are some kind of florescent plastic and
there's a scanning laser underneath drawing on it, so the amount of light
being generated at any given point is probably very low.

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david-given
Bear in mind that this technique can only produce light, not absorb it ---
which means no hidden line removal, so it'll be good for wireframe images
only, where you can see all sides of the shape at once. That doesn't mean it's
not awesomely cool, but it's going to have limited applications.

IIRC, the piston-head technique has been tried before, and has always had the
drawback that it's hellishly loud due to air displacement. I wonder how
they're getting round this?

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trevyn
A vacuum?

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karmakaze
A 3D ~~printer~~ display. Like when we first got display PostScript. Voxels
aren't just for programs anymore.

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rip747
could someone explain why their indiegogo campaign goal is only $500?

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munk
An active crowdfunding campaign was required for us to exhibit at the
TechCrunch Disrupt expo. It tied in nicely with a popup exhibition we have
been talking about doing for a while now.

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junto
3D FIFA 2020 multiplayer is going to awesome if they used this!

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anigbrowl
I'm having one of those SHUT UP AND TAKE MY MONEY moments.

