Scientist: Holographic television to become reality - CNN.com
LONDON, England (CNN) — Picture this: you’re sat down for the Football World Cup final, or a long-awaited sequel to the “Sex and the City” movie and you’re watching all the action unfold in 3-D on your coffee table.
The future of television? This image is an impression of what 3D holographic television may look like.
It sounds a lot like a wacky dream, but don’t be surprised if within our lifetime you find yourself discarding your plasma and LCD sets in exchange for a holographic 3-D television that can put Cristiano Ronaldo in your living room or bring you face-to-face with life-sized versions of your gaming heroes.
The reason for renewed optimism in three-dimensional technology is a breakthrough in rewritable and erasable holographic systems made earlier this year by researchers at the University of Arizona.
Dr Nasser Peyghambarian, chair of photonics and lasers at the university’s Optical Sciences department, told CNN that scientists have broken a barrier by making the first updatable three-dimensional displays with memory.
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“This is a prerequisite for any type of moving holographic technology. The way it works presently is not suitable for 3-D images,” he said.
The researchers produced displays that can be erased and rewritten in a matter of minutes.
To create television sets the images would need to be changing multiple times each second — but Peyghambarian is very optimistic this can happen.
He said the University of Arizona team, which is now ten-strong, has been working on advancing hologram technology since 1990 — so this is a major step forward. He believes that much of the difficulty in creating a holographic set has now been overcome.
“It took us a while to make that first breakthrough, but as soon as you have the first element of it working the rest often comes more rapidly,” he said. “What we are doing now is trying to make the model better. What we showed is just one color, what we are doing now is trying to use three colors. The original display was four inches by four inches and now we’re going for something at least as big as a computer screen.”
There are no more great barriers to overcome now, he said.
The breakthrough has made some long-time researchers of the technology believe that it could now come to fruition.
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?
Scientist: Holographic television to become reality - CNN.com
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