The amazing world of TV technology has just taken a few leaps forward as a real floating display is produced. Not only will the display will absolutely real looking and floating right in front of you, it is completely touchable too!
Although Mid-air plasma displays are not in every home but they are not ‘new’ either.
Floating lights created by using the existing techniques can burn the skin since every “voxel” (a pixel in 3D space) is made by heating molecules with nanosecond lasers.
Researchers from the University of Tsukuba, Utsunomiya University, Nagoya Institute of Technology and the University of Tokyo have been researching on technology that will allow people to touch the display without burning their fingers. They came up with lasers that fire bursts of plasma every few femtoseconds.
A femtosecond is one millionth of one billionth of a second, whereas a nanosecond is one billionth of a second.
Now these shorter bursts or pulses cannot damage the skin actually making it possible to touch the projection, in addition to this fascinating technology, the images can actually respond to touch in real time. They can also give feedback in response.
So far the femtosecond lasers can only render images up to eight cubic millimeters in size, with resolutions reaching up to 200,000 voxels per second.
Researchers are hoping to scale the technology up in the near future; this might be a giant leap into a whole new era of holograms etc.