Virtualization with a twist: direct conversion of 3D models into full color 3D holographic images. We can design worlds on a computer and see them in 3D. Can 3D TV and cheap holographic storage be far behind?

3D is hot in Hollywood right now, thanks to James Cameron’s painstaking technical work on Avatar and – the crucial fact – its record breaking box office. But it’s beginning to look like 3D is poised to move into our daily lives in multiple ways – from small 3D displays on cell phones to large, computer-generated color reflection holograms.

Zebra Imaging creates such holograms direct from 3D modeling data from programs like Autodesk. Here’s 16 seconds on what they look like:

Holographic motion pictures
Since we can create 1 color hologram, what’s stopping us from creating 24 a second for a couple of hours? Only the lack of sufficient computing power to drive detailed 3D pixel (”voxel” or Volumetric Picture Element) creation and an up-dateable holographic medium.

At the University of Arizona, researchers have demonstrated a system that produces a new monochrome image every 2 seconds. No good for football, but useful for medical or other remote imaging applications.

At next month’s Consumer Electronics Show a Hungarian company, iPONT, claims they will be showing a system aimed at consumers that converts Blu-ray 3D content into glasses-free 3D viewable across a 120 degree window. They say they can also convert live streaming 3D content as well.

I’ll be stopping by their booth to see – in living color 3D! – where hype and reality meet.

The Storage Bits take
The relationship between storage and display is surprisingly close: one of the earliest workable storage systems used cathode ray tubes – older folks may remember those – as storage. Any persistent medium can be used for storage. Interactive storage needs a rapidly re-writeable persistent medium.

The promise of holography has tantalized scientists, engineers and investors for decades. But harnessing holography for commercial customers isn’t easy.

Only with the mass production of a successful consumer product will holography become a mainstream storage technology.

By Robin Harris | December 8, 2010, 11:34am PST

Full story here: http://www.zdnet.com/blog/storage/glasses-free-3d-direct-from-computer-to-you/1209

Image deblurring has a long history involving signal processing, statistics, image processing, AI, inverse problems and so on. Today it’s probably best regarded as part of the bigger subject of computational photography. The problem is simple to state. You have a photo that is blurred due to some defect in the system – out-of-focus, motion blur due to camera or due to subject etc. In principle, as long as you assume that there are no non-linear effects the problem is one of inverse filtering. Work out the point spread function of the distortion and apply the inverse filter by either Fourier methods or direct convolution.

The big problem is, of course that you don’t have the point spread function of the blurring. In theory you should be able to work it out by analysing known objects in the image – for example if you are lucky enough to have isolated star in the image then you have the blurrings point spread function and can undo the blur. Another problem is that software deblurring algorithms often remove blurring due to depth of field effects which might have been included in the picture as an “artistic” effect.

Now a team at Microsoft Research has had an amazing about of fun building a camera with 3 gyros and a 3D accelerometer. The idea is that if you know the camera’s orientation and movement you can deduce the exact form of the distortion and apply the appropriate filter to undo the effect. The extra camera hardware – it’s based on an Arduino – computes the cameras position in realtime during the exposure (triggered via the flash connection).

The key result is that this whole camera sensor method worked better than lens based image stabilisation or software only deconvolution. It also only removes blur due to camera movement – linear and angular. It’s ideal for taking photos from the deck of a ship or any moving vehicle.

It also uses cheap off-the-shelf components so it’s entirely possible that it could end up in mobile phone cameras and other low end digital cameras. Of course you could just buy a tripod.

Full story here: http://www.i-programmer.info/news/144-graphics-and-games/1663-image-deblurring-using-inertial-measurement-sensors.html