Mist, Mirrors, Laser : Multi-view 3D Projection

“Lights, camera, action!” might have been the call when recording back in the day, but for an awesome three-dimensional viewing experience, you might try yelling “Mist, Mirrors, Laser!” and following in the footsteps of [Ancient]’s latest adventure in voxel displays, which is also embedded below.

He starts with a naive demonstration: take a laser projector and toss an image into a flat cloud of mist. That demonstrates that yes, the mist does resolve an image, and that the viewing angle is very poor– that is, brightness drops off sharply when you’re out of line from the projector. In this case, that’s a good thing! It means more angles can be projected into that mist for a three-dimensional, hologram effect.

The optical train gets folded up, probably to make this fit on a tabletop: first, an array of flat mirrors in front of the projector splits the image from the projector into multiple viewpoints, which are each bounced to a second flat mirror that sends the image into the fog bank.

Some might call the resulting image a hologram; others might complain that that’s technically something totally different, and that this volumetric display is just all smoke and mirrors. We can hope that [Ancient] sees fit to share more details, like the software stack needed to generate the video feed– though it’s likely using a version of the same software as his last volumetric display, which used the same laser but whose point cloud was made from a bubblegram rather than an actual cloud. With a lot more points, though, the resolution is amazing in comparison, at the cost of appearing fuzzy at the edges. Unfortunately, we do not see the display in this demo run DOOM, as one of his previous projects did.

This video is more of a demo than a how-to, but it’s a heck of an impressive demo. If you don’t feel like watching the assembly, jump right to 9:00 to be impressed. It comes across a lot better on video than in the screenshot.