A company named Actuality Systems has designed a new 3-D display and the first one was sold to the Adelphi, Md.-based U.S. Army Research Laboratory.
Actuality 's Perspecta display costs $40,000 and up, but the company says costs could drop so that the device would be affordable for ordinary consumers and gamers.
The 3D mechanism behind Perspecta goes back to the 1960s but had to wait for high-resolution processing and display technology to catch up. Perspecta uses a collection of proprietary algorithms to slice 3D data into a format that can be replicated in three spatial dimensions. A projector then displays the data at 5,000 frames per second onto a rotating screen within the transparent sphere, in such a way that the eye sees a 3D image.
The image comprises 198 two-dimensional slices, with a 768-by-768-pixel resolution for each slice. The image is displayed using a Texas Instruments 1600 MIPS digital signal processor with a 24Hz volume refresh.
Each 10-inch-diameter image contains 100 million "volume pixels," or "voxels," according to Actuality, and can be viewed from any angle.
If you know someone at Actuality Systems, please tell them I would be more than happy to become a beta-tester of their product.
Source: Matthew Broersma, CNET News.com, June 27, 2002
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