Multimodal Acoustic Trap Displays (AKA OMG WTF HOLOGRAMS!!)
Not “baseball card” holograms.
Not “augmented or virtual reality” holograms.
Not even “projected on glass” holograms.
We are talking real, full 3D, “levitating in the air in front of you” holograms.
No wearables needed!
Movies like Bladerunner and Star Wars and TV shows like Star Trek have instilled in us what the future should look like. So, while VR/AR head-mounted displays are very cool, they don’t quite live up to what we expect the cutting edge to be.
Multimodal Acoustic Trap Displays, or MATDs for short, could easily be what us sci-fi enthusiast have been waiting for.
They are made from inexpensive materials and they’re based on the simple and age-old concept of persistence of vision in the human eye. You know, when something is moving so fast it looks like a solid object.
Persistence of Vision
Old CRT TV screens are a great practical example of this, so let's go on a quick side tangent.
CRT TVs illuminate one pixel of light in sequence to make a line across the TV screen so fast that it just looks like a solid line.
That line repeats down the screen so quickly that our eyes are tricked into seeing a solid picture.
This happens over and over through a number of frames to create a moving image.
Boom! You have a 2D moving image from a REALLY fast-moving spec of light.
Back to holograms!
The MATDs work on the same principle, but instead of points of light moving around, it’s moving a little polystyrene ball and hitting it with bursts of light.
Polystyrene balls are those little white balls that stick to everything when you break styrofoam apart or pop your favorite bean bag. Ick!
To move that little ball around in the air, researchers at the University of Sussex in Brighton, UK use 512 ultrasound speakers that compress and decompress the air around the ball.
This creates little pockets of high pressure and low pressure that can steer the ball around in 3D space extremely fast (about 100 times per second).
Light hits the ball at specific times to create the same effect as a pixel lighting up with the right colors. We now have that CRT TV display in three dimensions!
The final product is a floating hologram that looks like this.
In fact, in person, it looks even better than this because our eyes blend everything together. The camera doesn’t.
The Possibilities!
MATDs can do even more than just visuals. They claim to let you hear and feel the holograms too! I won’t go into the details here, but you can read more about it in this article published by the journal Nature.
Lead researcher Ryuji Hirayama in an interview with Futurism said, “The MATD was created using low-cost and commercially available components. We believe there is plenty of room to increase its capacity and potential.”
This is perfect for universities and hobbyists to get their hands on and start innovating with because the cost to entry is low and this is building on well-known concepts.
With a little innovation, we could be seeing a complete revamp of our lives.
- Playing video games and watching movies would be amazing in volumetric 3D or as a floating 2D screen!
- We could be seeing the giant holographic advertisements that let you know that you're in an awesome sci-fi movie!
- Telecommunications would be MUCH more personal. You’re looking good, Grandma! Are those new shoes?
- Room-scale arrays could create real-life holodecks. Time to join Captain Picard on one of his detective mystery scenarios.
- Google Maps in 3D would help you navigate those tight spaces like city buildings or Elon’s underground tunnel network.
- Holographic dashboards and computer terminals would push UX/UI design to their limits!
- The medical field would benefit from holographic readouts of the human body that allow surgeons, doctors, and staff to quickly understand the complexities of the emergency.
- There is also the elephant in the room that I have to acknowledge; The porn industry would be revolutionized. They would also be early adopters of the technology as they often are with any new visual media.
THE FUTURE
I can’t wait to see this tech develop.
I fully expect to see advanced MATDs popping up at CES not too many years from now. Just picture showstopping 9ft+ holographic advertisement lighting up our eyes.
Microsoft, you should be all over this.
