Kinect-Driven 3D Holographic Chat: Is This the Future of Avatar Interaction?

When I think about the future of virtual worlds and 3D-based interaction, I'm less likely to think of tablet computing, and more apt to look at things like this -- Human Media Lab's TeleHuman, a Kinect-driven 3D holographic chat:

Read about how they do that on Gizmodo: "The director of the Human Media Lab says the TeleHuman could be available for $5,000 within five years." If there's market interest, I bet it could be done sooner and much cheaper. And because you're converting a person into 3D visual data, it's easy to think about immersing them into a simulated 3D environment, so it doesn't feel like you're talking with a disembodied ghost.

Hat tip: Jeremy Owen Turner.

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Comments

[Ann Otoole InSL]

Oh cool! scifi bars can have virtual gogo girl holos! awesome!

[Canoro Philipp]

i would go more on the side that Google´s Project Glass is the technology that could bring virtual worlds to mainstream, for the people to have a true 3D virtual world experience they would have to be able to walk around a virtual object and maybe interact with it, a GPS system attached to the glasses could help to bring virtual objects to reality, using a system like Second Life, the GPS could store the position and shape of the objects, download the data closest to your location, and display it when you or another person wearing those glasses looks at the same place, with this solution, we would be able to create prims and meshes in the real world for everyone with those glasses to see.

[shockwave yareach]

@Ann - sadly, no. Take a look at those Kinect sensors above the cylinder. This is to figure out where the viewer is so that the proper image can be rendered with all the projectors in the base.

Viewer. As in Singular.

If you have multiple viewers, the display will not be able to show each of them a different image. It will only be able to project a single image, and everyone who is not the targeted viewer will see nothing but a texture wrapped onto a cylinder.

I have only seen one tru Holo projector, one that can show a different perspective to multiple people at the same time. It was a spinning mirror which bounced an image from a screen above it toward the viewers. The eye only gets a view when the mirror is pointed directly at it via an optics trick. So changing the picture as the mirror spins gives the ability for an infinite number of eyes to see the same thing but at different perspectives. But it's loud, glitchy, and definately not ready for mass production. It does have one thing over HMD in that everyone can see the images with no glasses or anything.

[duamemon]

i really love him work. very talented