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From: rick@pangea.Stanford.EDU (Rick Ottolini)
Newsgroups: comp.graphics
Subject: Re: Digital Holography
Message-ID: <1991May9.153446.21742@leland.Stanford.EDU>
Date: 9 May 91 15:34:46 GMT
References: <1991May7.215514.6676@csl.dl.nec.com> <261@rins.ryukoku.ac.jp>
Sender: news@leland.Stanford.EDU (Mr News)
Organization: Stanford Univ. Earth Sciences
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IMHO digital holography will be THE 3-D graphics technique of the future.
Current rendering techniques SIMULATE 3-D through the using of lighting
models, shape [perspective, stereo], and motion [fly-thru animation,
virtual reality animation].  Holography seeks to compute actual light waves
themselves.  I envision "Princess Lea" displays, floating images like that
of the help message in Star Wars I.  This avoids the sensory sheaths the
VR people are using.
The mathematics of digital holography are fairly well known, but the computations
are expensive.  They are similar to other imaging mathematics such as my field
of seismic imaging.  Even with all kinds of shortcuts thrown in, it will take
billions to trillions of calculations per second to display interesting
holographic images.  With the computing speeds increasing an order of magnitude
every five years and no end in sight, we are taking about the early 21st
century for this capability.  The Popular Science article of last year equates
the complexity of MIT Media Lab holo-images with 2-D graphics on oscilloscopes 30
years ago.  So this technology is probably realizable in most readers lifetimes.
As pointed out in an early posting, much work still has to be done in the
display hardware, that is getting the numerical description of the light waves
converted into light.