Editors’ Pick: Innovation > From Science-Fiction to Reality Part 1

R&D on new materials offers a good illustration of how the media – in all their variety, whether specialised and/or general – can serve as a relay across the Web and the blogosphere. In November, two discoveries enjoyed particularly extensive coverage and attention, most often conveyed to the general public from the angle, “innovation and applied science-fiction”:  
> Star Wars and 3D Holographic Video: The Skype of the Future?

 

Researchers at the College of Optical Sciences at the University of Arizona, working in partnership with Nitto Denko Technical Corporation, have come out with a photorefractive polymer capable of transcribing video data, sent over such media as the Internet, into a 3D-holographic projection in near-real time (2s needed for total hologram reprogramming). Future improvements to the material performance and data acquisition and transmission modes might open up prospects on the market, for concrete applications in the field of medical imaging, military defence, 3D-videoconferencing (remote presence) or new types of 3D-television in the 10 years to come. This research stands in the very midst of what George Lucas foresaw 30 years ago in Star Wars, as the authors in the abstract emphasise in their study, as well as in many of the specialised magazines and semi-amateur blogs that brought the news to the public eye, in November and December. 

 Demo clip published by Science News on Vimeo.

 

Nature magazine, the first to publish the study online, dedicated its cover and an editorial to it, also providing all of the visuals illustrating the researchers’ feat.