Readers may remember webcam company CamSoda promising to bring live holographic cam girl shows to your home as early as 2016. Well, we’re still waiting to even hear anything futher regarding that promise, but it looks like genuine holographic video chat (and not the ‘Pepper’s Ghost‘ variety that CamSoda was promising) might be here soon according to researchers at Queens University in Canada.
KINGSTON – A Queen’s University researcher will soon unveil TeleHuman 2 – the world’s first truly holographic videoconferencing system. TeleHuman2 allows people in different locations to appear before one another in life-size 3D – as if they were in the same room.
“People often think of holograms as the posthumous Tupac Shakur performance at Coachella 2012,” says Roel Vertegaal, Professor of Human-Computer Interaction at the Queen’s University School of Computing. “Tupac’s image, however, was not a hologram but a Pepper Ghost: A two-dimensional video projected on a flat piece of glass. With TeleHuman 2, we’re bringing actual holograms to life.”
Using a ring of intelligent projectors mounted above and around a retro-reflective, human-sized cylindrical pod, Dr. Vertegaal’s team has been able to project objects as light fields that can be walked around and viewed from all sides simultaneously by multiple users – much like Star Trek’s famed, fictional ‘holodeck’. Capturing the remote 3D image with an array of depth cameras, his team has ‘teleported’ live, 3D images of a human from one room to another – a feat that is set to revolutionize human telepresence. Because the display projects a light field with many images, one for every degree of angle, users need not wear a headset or 3D glasses to experience each other in augmented reality.
https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2018-04/qu-mot042518.php
