Communications of the ACM
Leia in Your Living Room: Projecting a Star-Wars-Style Hologram With a Microsoft Kinect
The MIT students used the Kinect and a laptop with an off-the-shelf graphics card to produce holograms at 15 frames per second, including one of Princess Leia.
Photo courtesy of MIT
Michael Bove, director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Object-Based Media Group (OBMG), recently purchased a Kinect for his graduate students to experiment with in his lab. Bove's students used the Kinect and a laptop with an off-the-shelf graphics card to produce holograms at 15 frames per second. The Kinect feeds the data into the laptop, which relays it over the Internet, where a PC with three graphics processing units computes the diffraction patterns.
One of the key challenges for OBMG's researchers is making the real-time holographic video system work on less-expensive equipment. Most of the existing equipment is extremely costly and requires manipulating huge amounts of data.
"[We're] trying to turn holographic video from a lab curiosity into a consumer product," Bove says.
The current holographic display is a complex acousto-optic modulator that diffracts and shifts the frequency of light using sound waves. The OBMG researchers plan to replace the expensive modulator with a less expensive consumer model.
From Popular Science
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