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Category: holograms – Page 17

Forget 5G, the U.S. and China Are Already Fighting for 6G Dominance

For companies and governments, the stakes couldn’t be higher. The first to develop and patent 6G will be the biggest winners in what some call the next industrial revolution. Though still at least a decade away from becoming reality, 6G — which could be up to 100 times faster than the peak speed of 5G — could deliver the kind of technology that’s long been the stuff of science fiction, from real-time holograms to flying taxis and internet-connected human bodies and brains.

Most of the world is yet to experience the benefits of a 5G network, but the geopolitical race for the next big thing in telecommunications technology is already heating up. For companies and governments, the stakes couldn’t be higher.

Looking Glass converts any photo into 3D image

On the first day of a popular psychology course in the 1970s at City College of New York, students were told the story of how a remote South American tribe that was never exposed to technology or even electricity reacted when they saw a cowboy program on TV for the first time. Panic-stricken viewers dodged out of the way as galloping horses disappeared at the edge of the screen, while others searched high and low to find the missing animals. These were old, bulky televisions with scrappy black-and-white displays. But to the tribe members, the images were chillingly real.

One wonders how those folks—not to mention modern-day tech geeks as well as the general public—would react to a portable projector that fits in the palm of your hand and is capable of displaying stunningly realistic 3D color . Chances are they’d be pretty impressed.

Looking Glass Factory, a Brooklyn-based tech firm, is set to offer an 8 holographic display called Portrait that will convert users’ favorite personal photos into lifelike holograms. No special equipment or skills are required. Users simply take regular 2-D photos with any device, ranging from sophisticated DSLR setups to low-end cellphones—even old family Polaroids should work—and send them to Looking Glass Factory’s cloud-based service.

Voxon’s US$10,000 hologram table – no glasses required

Interactive 3D images that appear to float in the air, above a table that a group of people can stand around without needing any special headsets or glasses: that’s what South Australian company Voxon Photonics has built with its US$10,000 VX1 table.

Fiction has promised us holograms for decades, with one of the most famous examples appearing in 1977’s Star Wars: A New Hope. On board the Millennium Falcon, R2D2 and Chewbacca play some sort of digital board game, interacting with figures built out of light hovering in the air above a table.

Such things have been a long time coming to the real world. VR and AR can both somewhat replicate the experience, but they require headsets. In the best case, these are a bit antisocial, stopping you from looking others in the eye. In the worst case, they completely remove the wearer from the real world to immerse them in virtual space.

This “Portal” Lets You Beam a Hologram of Yourself Into Video Calls

Shrinking Down

In a bid to sell more than “several dozen” models, the company is now working on a more accessible, miniature version that records and transmits holograms without taking up the entire height of a room. And, company founder David Nussbaum tells TechCrunch, it comes with new subscription features.

“The minis will be bundled with content like Peloton and Mirror bundled with very specific types of content,” Nussbaum said. “We are in conversations with a number of extremely well-known content creators where we would bundle a portal but will also have dedicated and exclusive content.”

Holo-UNet: hologram-to-hologram neural network restoration for high fidelity low light quantitative phase imaging of live cells

Intensity shot noise in digital holograms distorts the quality of the phase images after phase retrieval, limiting the usefulness of quantitative phase microscopy (QPM) systems in long term live cell imaging. In this paper, we devise a hologram-to-hologram neural network, Holo-UNet, that restores high quality digital holograms under high shot noise conditions (sub-mW/cm2 intensities) at high acquisition rates (sub-milliseconds). In comparison to current phase recovery methods, Holo-UNet denoises the recorded hologram, and so prevents shot noise from propagating through the phase retrieval step that in turn adversely affects phase and intensity images. Holo-UNet was tested on 2 independent QPM systems without any adjustment to the hardware setting. In both cases, Holo-UNet outperformed existing phase recovery and block-matching techniques by ∼ 1.8 folds in phase fidelity as measured by SSIM. Holo-UNet is immediately applicable to a wide range of other high-speed interferometric phase imaging techniques. The network paves the way towards the expansion of high-speed low light QPM biological imaging with minimal dependence on hardware constraints.

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