Interesting technology. What are there some industries where this is likely to get adopted quickly? Are there engineers who have been waiting for this type of technology to solve specific problems? You mentioned medical. Are there others? I can imagine this would have game applications, but that will probably require significant price reductions.
I'm not sure engineers are waiting for something like this, Rob, because I'm not sure you can really envision what exactly a holographic view is unless you see it and try it. That said, if a device like this works as promised and the company can gain some traction with a distribution channel and ISV support, I could imagine a host of applications and industries where it could be applied. I don't think it's really industry specific--just another way of looking at virtual images trying to make them more lifelike and helping to avoid some of the physical prototyping stages which is costly.
I'm wondering about the computational requirements of this system, and the required hardware. Apparently, from the website, one needs a higher end PC, Windows 7, and a stereo graphics card, and then you buy the special monitor/interactive screen, plus the stylus and glasses as pictured. So is this mostly off-the-shelf?
It strikes me that many of the advances and features we're attributing to CAD per se are actually visualization features or capabilities being added into CAD packages. In other words, if you go back to the SIGGRAPH conferences of a decade ago, you'll see all the 3D and rotating/360-degree view stuff, which is being folded into CAD now. So it's good stuff and I'm not denigrating it at all, just making the point that its roots seem to predate CAD. It's the availability of greater processing power on the desktop which enables these features to come to CAD today.
This will add another dimension to the design world for sure. This reminds of Arthur C Clarke and his famous point that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
Visualization is definitely a core part of today's CAD offerings, Alex, and a critical element at that. And you are correct in pointing out that these capabilities are being folded in because of exponential leap in processing performance. Today's workstations, even high-end laptops, are perfectly capable of displaying life-life 3D images whereas in decades past, you need highly specialized workstations to do so.
This is fantastic! This isn't really engineering related, but years ago I was working on a very large Army project and this is exactly what they wanted. Of course, their interest was in looking at terrain before engaging the enemy. We saw a system at MIT that would project a hologram in space. This was 20 years ago, mind you. It did not require any special display technology, so you could walk around the hologram. On the other hand it took a large Connection Machine to compute the hologram (this would take the place of the graphics card) and had some very complex lasers and other devices to actually project the image.
In the engineering realm, I have seen some demand coming for 3D printers. This would be a better approach, I would think, in that you can interact with and modify the model. There would still be a place for the 3D printer, but this might be cheaper and more functional.
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