The Interactive 360-Degree Light Field Display is being developed by the USC Institute for Creative Technologies. All images courtesy of ACM SIGGRAPH 2007. 

As you will no doubt witness if you attend SIGGRAPH 2007 at the San Diego Convention Center, the horizon for Emerging Technologies is far-reaching and quite expansive. It covers a time frame anywhere from a year to 10 years down the line. The exhibition presents creative, innovative technologies and applications in displays, robotics, input devices, interaction techniques, computer vision, sensors, audio, speech, biometrics, wearable computing, information, data and scientific visualization, biotechnology, graphics, collaborative environments, design and more. The areas of application include but are not limited to medicine, music, entertainment, education, home, business, aerospace, communication, transportation, security, military and technologies for the aging and/or disabled.

I spoke with the co-chair of Emerging Technologies, John Sibert, professor of computer sciences at The George Washington University, about those particular technologies and applications that are related to theaters and home theater. "One of our focuses this year is on display technology because there's a lot happening right now," Sibert asserts, "and the next generation of displays for PCs and television sets are going to be truly amazing."

One category of displays centers on digital projection. "DLP-3D TV is new technology that T. I. (Texas Instruments) has developed that will enable you to do on a home television HD display 3-D stereo that you would normally see at a place like Disney or possibly in theaters," explains Sibert.

The DLP chip contains a rectangular array of up to two million hinge-mounted microscopic mirrors. Each of these micro-mirrors measures less than one-fifth the width of a human hair. The bit-streamed image code entering the semiconductor directs each mirror to switch on and off up to several thousand times per second. This fast switching rate enables a 120Hz frame rate, which allows display of 3-D stereographic images at 60Hz per eye without flicker. However, 3-D viewing glasses will be required.

"Apparently the chip is capable of being mass-produced relatively inexpensively, so it'll be something TV manufactures will be able to include within their sets without greatly increasing the cost," says Sibert. More than 1,000,000 3-D-ready DLP televisions are expected to be in consumers' homes by mid-2008.

Another interesting display technology is the Interactive 360-Degree Light Field Display being developed by the USC Institute for Creative Technologies. "The thing about 3-D displays is that they don't show very well on a web page," states Sibert. "The cool thing about this display is that you don't have to wear glasses, and it's based on kind of an old idea of a rotating mirror that reflects the image, which appears to be three-dimensional. Usually 3-D images are hard to move around or change the shape of in realtime. This one works fast enough that it can actually do that. Also, people can stand around it in a group and see the full 3-D."

The concept behind this technology is to render and project the correct geometric light field of an object at 5,000 frames-per-second onto a spinning anisotropic reflector. Motion-tracked vertical parallax is then employed to allow for unrestricted 3-D movement with correct geometric cues.

Holographic and Action Capture Techniques by Holograpfika intends to show a working example of a system with realtime-captured data of human actors complete with the geometry, texturing and dynamics of the body.

As one might expect, there is a holographic display as well. This one is being developed by a European company, Holografika. "The holographic displays work on completely different principals, and they've been around for a while, and they're getting better and better all the time," says Sibert. "The limitations in holographic displays have been in terms of dynamics in moving the images and also in terms of resolution. Holographic displays have tended to be very low-resolution displays, but they have been getting better all the time. This one (Holograpfika's Holographic and Action Capture Techniques) is doing interaction with a holographic display in realtime, and the exciting thing about it is the level of interaction in realtime."

At SIGGRAPH 2007, Holograpfika intends to show a working example of a system with real-time captured data of human actors complete with the geometry, texturing and dynamics of the body, insert the acquired 3-D data stream into a high-quality 3-D scenario, and present the resulting scene to the naked eye in true 3-D or on a large-scale holographic display.