14 DAY TRIAL // This month, at Siggraph 2015, a group of researchers presented a display that creates a 3D human in incredible detail by cumulating 216 projectors.
Built by the USC Institute for Creative Technologies, the automultiscopic 3D display that basically builds a 3D model of a person with video is probably the next step beyond Oculus Rift. After a model person is video-captured using 30 cameras in intensely bright light, the images are divided among 216 projectors.
The video projectors are then aligned in a semicircle around a large screen. Viewers walking around the screen will have their eyes seamlessly transition from a projection to the next. The end result is the hologram of a person in extreme detail and depth.
The end result of this effort is realistic enough to have people who witnessed or went through great or tragic events be immortalized in this fashion and be placed in museums or educational contexts to tell their stories in a very convincing manner.
This way, they could connect with their audience and have it see the person being interviewed in the most complete way, with all the physical details included. The device also has speech recognition embedded in the system in order to detect pre-determined questions being asked to the screen, in order to seem as they were asked directly to the VR person in front of them.