Holographic teleportation is when a hologram is transmitted to a different location instantaneously.
While it is something that was only seen in SciFi movies like Star Wars, on July 27 at the Western Institute for Space Exploration (Western Space), the world’s first-ever international holoport was demonstrated.
Project leader Leap Biosystem’s co-founder, Dr Adam Sirek said that they executed two-way holographic teleportation.
Holographic teleportation could solve the many issues that 2D virtual meetings have these days. Besides, you could simply beam into work while at home.
Researchers at the University of Western Ontario recently completed the world’s first-ever international holographic teleportation.
The coronavirus pandemic pushed the digitalization of many day-to-day functions of our lives. An important one among them was meeting people. Instead of having to commute to the office or travel across the oceans for a meeting, one could simply connect via an online video call and get the work done.
Even after two years, virtual meetings haven’t been able to completely replicate the ease of an in-person meeting, something that researchers are hoping holographic teleportation can solve. A combination of hologram and teleport, the technology is fondly called holoport and allows one to instantly beam the hologram of a person to a far-off location, much like the Star Trek universe.
Holographic teleportation sounds like something out of Star Wars or Star Trek, but instead of the bridge of a flashy interstellar spaceship, a world-first technological achievement took place in a nondescript boardroom on campus at Western recently.
The term holographic teleportation, or holoport, is a combination of hologram and teleport: when a hologram of a person or object is transmitted instantaneously to another location.
On the afternoon of July 27, a small group of students from the Western Institute for Space Exploration (Western Space) gathered to witness and take part in the world’s first international holoport demonstration.
Circa 2021
No longer relegated to science fiction, holodeck-style creations from Silicon Valley company Light Field Lab are here today.
Swave Photonics has designed holographic chips on a proprietary diffractive optics technology to “bring the metaverse to life.”
Can virtual reality become indistinguishable from actual reality? Swave Photonics, a spinoff of Imec and Vrije Universiteit Brussel, has designed holographic chips on a proprietary diffractive optics technology to “bring the metaverse to life.” The Leuven, Belgium–based startup has raised €7 million in seed funding to accelerate the development of its multi-patented Holographic eXtended Reality (HXR) technology.
“Our vision is to empower people to visualize the impossible, collaborate, and accomplish more,” Théodore Marescaux, CEO and founder of Swave Photonics, told EE Times Europe. “With our HXR technology, we want to make that extended reality practically indistinguishable from the real world.”
What does it mean to project images that are indistinguishable from reality? “It means a very wide field of view, colors, high dynamic range, the ability to move your head around an object and see it from different angles, and the ability to focus,” he said.
Researchers have come up with a new and improved way to levitate objects using sound waves alone, an impressive feat of mixed-reality technology that could pave the way for some seriously futuristic hologram-like displays.
As seen in a new video, the researchers were able to levitate individual polystyrene beads and water particles inside a special enclosure, making them move in three dimensions by adjusting the output of hundreds of small speakers, set up in a grid.
In one demonstration, they were even able to float a tiny piece of fabric in midair, on which they projected a movie of a leaping rabbit.
In forthcoming years, everyone will get to observe how beautifully Metaverse will evolve towards immersive experiences in hyperreal virtual environments filled with avatars that look and sound exactly like us. Neil Stephenson’s Snow Crash describes a vast world full of amusement parks, houses, entertainment complexes, and worlds within themselves all connected by a virtual street tens of thousands of miles long. For those who are still not familiar with the metaverse, it is a virtual world in which users can put on virtual reality goggles and navigate a stylized version of themselves, known as an avatar, via virtual workplaces, and entertainment venues, and other activities. The metaverse will be an immersive version of the internet with interactive features using different technologies such as virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), 3D graphics, 5G, hologram, NFT, blockchain, haptic sensors, and artificial intelligence (AI). To scale personalized content experiences to billions of people, one potential answer is generative AI, the process of using AI algorithms on existing data to create new content.
In computing, procedural generation is a method of creating data algorithmically as opposed to manually, typically through a combination of human-generated assets and algorithms coupled with computer-generated randomness and processing power. In computer graphics, it is commonly used to create textures and 3D models.
The algorithmic difficulty is typically seen in Diablo-style RPGs and some roguelikes which use instancing of in-game entities to create randomized items. Less frequently it can be used to determine the relative difficulty of hand-designed content to be subsequently placed procedurally, as can be seen with the monster design in Unangband. For example, the designer can rapidly create content, but leaves it up to the game to determine how challenging that content is to overcome, and consequently where in the procedurally generated environment this content will appear. Notably, the Touhou series of bullet hell shooters use algorithmic difficulty. Though the users are only allowed to choose certain difficulty values, several community mods enable ramping the difficulty beyond the offered values.
Circa 2021
Holograms aren’t new, but a desktop machine that spits them out could be available soon, presuming LitiHolo’s Kickstarter pans out. The machine will have a $1600 retail price and fits in a two-foot square. It can generate 4×5 inch holograms with 1mm hogels (the holo equivalent of a pixel).
The machine allows for 23 view zones per hogel and can create moving holograms with a few seconds of motion — like the famous kiss-blowing holograms.
Of course, you’ll also need a special self-developing film and a way to get 3D images into the printer such as software or a camera set up to do a 3D scan. In the 4×5 size, the film runs about $13 a plate which will create one hologram.
Circa 2014
For most of us, even one bite of chocolate is enough to send our taste buds into ecstasy. Now, scientists have concocted a process to make these dark, dulcet morsels look as decadent as they taste.
Switzerland-based company Morphotonix has given traditional Swiss chocolate-making a colorful twist: It’s devised a method to imprint shiny holograms onto the sweet surfaces — sans harmful additives. Which means when you tilt the goodies from side to side, rainbow stars and swirly patterns on the chocolate’s surface dance and shimmer in the light.
Typically, holograms are laser-imprinted onto a flat, metallic surface such as aluminum; the rainbow-colored hologram appears when light hits the surface at a certain angle (Think of the security sticker on the back of your credit card). But aluminum-drenched chocolate doesn’t sound very appetizing, so confectioners pour the chocolate into a mold etched with a patchwork of minuscule bumps, or microstructures, that bend light at specific angles — embedding a hologram directly onto its surface.
Quanta of light—photons—form the basis of quantum key distribution in modern cryptographic networks. Before the huge potential of quantum technology is fully realized, however, several challenges remain. A solution to one of these has now been found.
In a paper published in the journal Science, teams led by David Novoa, Nicolas Joly and Philip Russell report a breakthrough in frequency up-conversion of single photons, based on a hollow-core photonic crystal fiber (PCF) filled with hydrogen gas. First a spatio-temporal hologram of molecular vibrations is created in the gas by stimulated Raman scattering. This hologram is then used for highly efficient, correlation-preserving frequency conversion of single photons. The system operates at a pressure-tuneable wavelength, making it potentially interesting for quantum communications, where efficient sources of indistinguishable single-photons are unavailable at wavelengths compatible with existing fiber networks.
The approach combines quantum optics, gas-based nonlinear optics, hollow-core PCF, and the physics of molecular vibrations to form an efficient tool that can operate in any spectral band from the ultraviolet to the mid-infrared—an ultra-broad working range inaccessible to existing technologies. The findings may be used to develop fiber-based tools in technologies such as quantum communications, and quantum-enhanced imaging.
