Video Future October 6, 2008

Cisco has unveiled and demonstrated their new On-Stage TelePresence Holographic Video Conferencing. In layman’s terms, it means that now you can actually do that thing they do in Star Wars when they talk to a Princess Leia hologram, and it looks quite convincing. Here is the Cisco presentation :

Then today I read that holgraphic tv (something i had imagined since high school) is probably feasible and marketable within the next 12 years. Tung H. Jeong, a retired physics professor at Lake Forest College outside Chicago who had studied holography since the 1960s told NJ.com; "When we start talking about erasable and rewritable holograms, we are moving toward the possibility of holographic TV ... It has now been shown that physically, it's possible." And what might these holographic televisions look like? According to researchers, they could be constructed as a screen on the wall (like flat panel displays) that shows 3-D images, with all the image writing lasers behind the wall; or it could be like a horizontal panel on a table with holographic writing apparatus underneath. So, if this project is realized, you really could have a football match on your coffee table, or horror-movie villains jumping out of your wall. The Japanese Government is pushing huge financial and technical weight into the development of three-dimensional, virtual-reality television, and the country's Communications Ministry is aiming at having such technology available by 2020. Obstacles in the past has been the re-writing and data storage issues..With the right type of media (probably polymers ), this would result in about 1 giagbit per second writing speed. Read speeds can surpass this and experts believe 1-terabit per second readout is possible. While many holographic data storage models have used "page-based" storage, where each recorded hologram holds a large amount of data, more recent research into using submicrometre-sized "microholograms" has resulted in several potential 3D optical data storage solutions. While this approach to data storage can not attain the high data rates of page-based storage, the tolerances, technological hurdles, and cost of producing a commercial product are significantly lower. All I know is maybe someday soon the re-released version of Star Wars is going to be awesome, to experience.