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New 3D headset uses holograms and AI to create lifelike mixed reality visuals

Using 3D holograms polished by artificial intelligence, researchers introduce a lean, eyeglass-like 3D headset that they say is a significant step toward passing the “Visual Turing Test.”

“In the future, most virtual reality displays will be holographic,” said Gordon Wetzstein, a professor of electrical engineering at Stanford University, holding his lab’s latest project: a virtual reality display that is not much larger than a pair of regular eyeglasses. “Holography offers capabilities that we can’t get with any other type of display in a package that is much smaller than anything on the market today.”

Holography is a Nobel Prize-winning 3D display technique that uses both the reflecting from an object, as with a traditional photograph, and the phase of the light (the way the waves synchronize), to produce a hologram, a highly realistic three-dimensional image of the original object.

Scientists Create “Impossible” Molecule, Solving Century-Old Chemical Mystery

Scientists have created a once-theoretical molecule under space-like conditions, revealing new insights into the chemistry of the cosmos and the origins of complex compounds. Scientists from the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa’s Department of Chemistry have successfully synthesized methanetetrol.

Atomic Vision Achieved: New Microscope Sees Light at 1-Nanometer Precision

Scientists have built a microscope capable of visualizing optical responses at the scale of individual atoms, redefining the limits of optical imaging. Scientists have created a groundbreaking microscope capable of capturing how surfaces respond to light with an exceptional resolution of just one

Ultra-small optical devices rewrite the rules of light manipulation

In the push to shrink and enhance technologies that control light, MIT researchers have unveiled a new platform that pushes the limits of modern optics through nanophotonics, the manipulation of light on the nanoscale, or billionths of a meter.

The result is a class of ultra-compact optical devices that are not only smaller and more efficient than existing technologies, but also dynamically tunable, or switchable, from one optical mode to another. Until now, this has been an elusive combination in nanophotonics.

The work is reported in the July 8 issue of Nature Photonics.

Breaking the Speed Limit: High-Speed Optical Coherence Modulation With Lithium Niobate

Overcoming conventional technological limitations to realize high-speed optical coherence modulation at 350 kHz. Structured light fields possess a wide range of unique and powerful characteristics. By gaining greater control over their optical coherence, researchers can not only reduce the drawba

Simulating the Hawking effect and other quantum field theory predictions with polariton fluids

Quantum field theory (QFT) is a physics framework that describes how particles and forces behave based on principles rooted in quantum mechanics and Albert Einstein’s special relativity theory. This framework predicts the emergence of various remarkable effects in curved spacetimes, including Hawking radiation.

Hawking radiation is the thermal radiation theorized to be emitted by close to the (i.e., the boundary around a black hole after which gravity becomes too strong for anything to escape). As ascertaining the existence of Hawking radiation and testing other QFT predictions in space is currently impossible, physicists have been trying to identify that could mimic aspects of curved spacetimes in experimental settings.

Researchers at Sorbonne University recently identified a new promising experimental platform for simulating QFT and testing its predictions. Their proposed QFT simulator, outlined in a paper published in Physical Review Letters, consists of a one-dimensional quantum fluid made of polaritons, quasiparticles that emerge from strong interactions between photons (i.e., light particles) and excitons (i.e., bound pairs of electrons and holes in semiconductors).