A team at MIT Media Labs have used a single Kinect camera and standard graphics chips to create a holographic system. The Kinect camera captures around 15 frames of data a second which is fed in to an ordinary laptop. The data is then transmitted across the internet and received by a PC with three standard GPUs which regenerates the image as a hologram.
Sadly, the one piece of equipment you cannot buy from your local PC World to recreate the demo is the holographic imaging system, although MIT are developing a new display that will be smaller and cheaper to produce.
Prepare for a geekgasm: To demo the system MIT first transmitted images of a paper crane but then grad student Edwina Portocarrer donned a wig, tunic and those oh-so-iconic hair buns to recreate the famous ‘Help me Obi-Wan Kenobi’ scene from Star Wars.
The resolution of the demo is rather less than the special effects of Star Wars but MIT point out, “Princess Leia wasn’t being transmitted in real time. She was stored.”
Source: TG Daily
Squalje
Another step towards the destined road to ‘Holodecks’ from Star Trek.
jonny_bolton
Oh my god! The future is here!
englishgolfer
star wars was “a long time ago in a galaxy far far away” so your sentence should read “the past is here!”
*goes back to counting his star wars trading cards*
jayjay119
Long ago, yet somehow far into the future, in a time after M*A*S*H, yet before after M*A*S*H…
jonny_bolton
Ow, my head.
Bilbo_bobbins
good lord, thats a bit scary.
jayjay119
Shame, if Kinect could run holographics as standard that would make me take back every doubt I had about it. Unfortunately it doesn’t even sound possible on only one PC let alone one 360. Does anyone else find it slightly ironic that Kinect, and 360 specific peripheral is having better products with hacks on PCs?
cc_star
Producing a control method or a tech demo is very different to making a marketable game.
I think its a missed opportunity for MS, because surely Kinect devs experiments in similar ways to this, but MS only allowed vids of saccharine-sweet families hi-fiving each other, whilst Sony were showing off PS Move Richard Marks’ tech demos to fan-gasms everywhere. I think it’s a course of action that lost MS a lot of good will amongst gamers for its peripheral although MS were probably too busy chasing the Wii upgraders market
bunimomike
Exactly. MS aren’t worried about the hardcore gamer on the 360. Sure, it’s nice if they pick one up too but they want a slice of the Wii market. Faked footage, staged demos that aren’t live at all. Who cares? If the average consumer is fooled into thinking it’s the best thing since Kelly Brook appeared naked in the film Piranha, then people will lap it up.
jayjay119
I agree, the most annoying part about Kinect really is the looming brick wall that it’s dashing towards. Kinect could do a lot with peripherals, but MS made too big a deal of the ‘you are the controller’ bit to go back on their word.
4lf13
You must use the force wisely, Luke.
What! Who said that!
irnmunkey
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4LW8wgmfpTE
There you go the videos on You Tube not that you can really make out what the hologram looks like?
Apnomis
I’m confused what exactly is the Kinect doing in this process? It seems to use laptops, graphics chips, the internet and some fancy holographic machinery at the receiving end – so as far as it reads to me all the Kinect is doing is sending the video/motion capture to the laptop for transmission? Unless I’m missing something it hardly sounds like Kinect was integral to this process, just a convenient means of capturing the source data? The headline makes it sound like the image was beamed directly out of the Kinect camera or something!
RadicalMave07
my thoughts exactly,i dont know how kinect fits into the whole story
AJ
Well, I’ll be skipping the 3D gen, and waiting for holograms!