You possibly point and laugh at your pals after they have big, bulky 3D glasses perched on their noses in theaters. That sort of tomfoolery just won’t do amongst the army brass, who frown on the slightest hint of snickering within the operations room. This new 3D system, called the Urban Photonic Sandtable Display (UPSD), might actually help. It’s a DARPA project, a totally holographic table (no glasses required) that may be scaled as much as six feet diagonally and allows visual depth of as much as 12-inches. The technology comes courtesy of Zebra Imaging , which earlier wowed us with some insane 3D printouts , and the info will come from LIDAR systems like this ROAMS bot. No word on when the system will probably be deployed to the sector, however it should allow grizzled commanders and uppity businessmen to locate unobtanium deposits, no matter if they happen to be located right under a huge ‘ol tree.
DARPA SUCCESSFULLY COMPLETES 3D HOLOGRAPHIC DISPLAY TECHNOLOGY DEMONSTRATION PROGRAMMarch 24, 2011
A lot of today’s conflicts occur in urban settings, making the facility to imagine conditions in urban areas increasingly important to commanders and mission planners. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) recently completed a five-year program called Urban Photonic Sandtable Display (UPSD) that creates a true-time, color, 360-degree 3D holographic display to help battle planners. With no need to wear 3D goggles or glasses, a team of planners can view a huge-format, interactive 3D display. Beforehand, two-dimensional, high-resolution flat panel color displays and 3D static monochrome images were the foremost advanced visual planning tools available.
UPSD assists team-based mission planning, visualization and interpretation of complex 3D data equivalent to intelligence and medical imagery. It permits simultaneous viewing for as much as 20 participants and is interactive, allowing the picture to be frozen, rotated and zoomed as much as the resolution limit of the information. The holographic display enables full visual depth capability as much as 12 inches. The technology also enables realistic two-dimensional printouts of the 3D imagery that front line troops can take with them on missions.
UPSD relies on full-parallax technology, which enables each 3D holographic object to project the right amount of sunshine that the unique object possessed in each direction, for full 360- degree viewing. Current 3D displays lack full-parallax and only provide 3D viewing from certain angles with typically only three to four inches of visual depth.
Presently UPSD is a scalable display platform that may be expanded from a six-inch diagonal size as much as a six-foot diagonal, in both monochrome and color formats.
UPSD is a part of DARPA’s broader efforts in 3D technology research. DARPA recently demonstrated a large-area 3D LIDAR (Light Detection and varying) mapping capability under DARPA’s High Altitude LIDAR Operations Experiment (HALOE). HALOE is providing forces in Afghanistan with unprecedented access to high-resolution 3D data, collected at rates orders of magnitude faster and from for much longer ranges than conventional methods. UPSD’s 3D display can support the rapid exploitation of this information for detailed mission planning in rugged, mountainous and sophisticated urban terrain.
DARPA is initially transitioning the UPSD technology to an Air Force research center and two Army research centers to use the technology to critical applications where the 3D holographic display will provide a special benefit.
Zebra Imaging of Austin, Texas, was awarded the initial contract in 2005 and has researched and developed the technology.
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