Star Wars-Inspired 3D Graphic Displays Float in Space
Brigham Young University engineers have developed a technique for creating a full-color 3D graphic display that can float in free space - and is visible from any angle. "This display is like a 3D printer for light. You're actually printing an object in space with these little particles," says BYU electrical engineering professor Daniel Smalley. Inspired by the displays of science fiction, most notably the projection of Star Wars' Princess Leia, the new Optical Trap Display (OTD) technique creates a 3D volumetric image by trapping and illuminating a particle with a laser, and then scanning the image in free space. To learn more, read a Tech Briefs Q&A with Smalley .
Transcript
00:00:00 We at Brigham Young University have created a volumetric display that is both high resolution and full-color that is very much like the displays of science fiction. We started this project with the goal in mind of creating the Princess Leia projection. Often when we think of an image that's floating in space that's 3D, we think of a hologram but really a hologram cannot make the Princess Leia image or the Avatar table or the Iron Man display. A 3D image that floats in air that you can walk all around and see from every angle, this image is called a volumetric image. Essentially it's an image that is taking up three-dimensional space. We're actually using a laser beam to trap a particle and then we can move that particle to create the image.
00:00:46 We get a particle into the trap by sweeping through the focus see a little particle like that it's now trapped and it's dragged along with the scan of the mirrors and while it's trapped laser light will hit that particle and that would glow because there's all this light scattering off of it. This is not unlike the effect you'll see with a sparkler if you move it quickly enough it doesn't look just like one point it looks like a line. We can think about this image like a 3D printed object. A single point was dragged sequentially through all of these image points to create this 3D image in space. This display is like a 3D printer for
00:01:23 light you're actually printing an object in space with these little particles. This is not a hologram we've demonstrated here that we can see it from the front you can see it from the back and in reality we can see it from almost any angle. Here we see the culmination of three years of effort our display is projecting a small particle focused right here. It's being dragged up and down vertically rastering this image of Princess Leia. The contribution BYU has made is that we're providing a method of making a volumetric image that can essentially create the images that we imagine we'll have in the future.
00:02:01 The future won't be the future without a Princess Leia projector and this can make that a reality.