Wednesday, September 29, 2021
New Tech Lets You ‘Feel’ Holograms Like STAR TREK’s Holodeck
Nerdist: In what is undoubtedly another step toward an IRL Star Trek holodeck researchers at the University of Glasgow in Scotland have developed holograms people can “feel” with their hands. The interactive holograms are quite basic at this point, but the proof of concept is certainly there. And, incredibly (dare we say magically?!), the system relies ultimately on illusions and air.
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The use of ‘feel’ in this context is very interesting. There is a question of experiencing your senses. I feel that by expanding the limits of the amount of senses you can typically observe in an installation, we are expanding the realm of our expressive capabilities as artists. For some stories, this can create new meanings as well as allowing us to find new ways of being more representative or maybe even more other-worldly if needed. Specifically to this article, in many theatrical settings the audience receives an abundance of visual and auditory stimuli, but because there is a lack of physical interaction there is a lack of feel in taste, touch, or smell. This could completely modernize theater, because we could create interactive experiences that don’t break the illusion of the world that has been created. The idea that this may be possible someday in the future is so exciting, and honestly inspiring. I feel that we are currently in an incredible time of innovation for the arts.
This new piece of tech is super exciting, of course, it's a step closer towards the age of science fiction that is fast approaching and it's closer to the star trek fantasy than anything of its kind before, but it's still obviously a long long long way off. I think the article gives the invention more credit than it deserves, as it reminds me of early 90’s cgi at this point. Perhaps in ten or twenty years this will become something tangible or useful, but at this point I don’t see the hype, but perhaps I just don’t have enough respect for science. I also struggle to think of the uses for something like this, beyond fun. Perhaps if it got detailed enough it could be used by med students to practice surgery or instituted into CPR courses, but that level of detail sounds very nearly unattainable to my ears, based on the evidence from the article.
This is an interesting article with a very click bait name. I think it is so cool they are using a combination of the Pepper’s Ghost and air gusts as the way they are doing this though. Creating a haptic response with virtual reality and gloves is nothing new but this is a method that doesn’t require anything to be worn on the user. That is the key to tricking the brain it seems. This is a great way to start the move towards real interactive holography. In Star Trek they use force fields to create the pressure and texture but until we figure that part out we will have to live with this. I do wonder if there are ways to use neuroscience and find ways to trick the brain into feeling not just resistance but texture and pressure. Of course that would be closer to The Matrix and that is a whole other franchise.
This article is not quite what I expected to be – primarily because the “feeling” of the hologram is actually nothing more than air. From an outsider point of view, without being able to experience the technology myself, I really fail to see how bursts of air could so accurately simulate feeling and touch via aerohaptics. I will withhold judgement, however, until perhaps someday I can try out the technology myself. According to the article, one of the people who tried the aerohaptics claimed they could feel the curvature of the basketball projection, but I just have a hard time believing that that can be accomplished solely through the use of air. That being said, maybe I am wrong, and this is going to be the origin or breakthrough of solid hologram technology, and some day we will have room sized holo decks which would can “interact” with objects that are little more than air and some creative projections. Alas, I do have to be a pessimist in this case, and without being able to try it myself, I simply cannot imagine how this would feel even remotely accurate.
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