Star Wars geeks, hold onto your stormtrooper helmets.
Researchers at MIT are working to make one of your wildest dreams come true. OK, maybe not wildest — there isn’t an intergalactic battle or swords made of plasma beams.
But there is a princess in distress.
The MIT Media Lab is pioneering holographic technology under the premise that holograph televisions aren’t quite as futuristic as Star Wars might have you believe. As a test, they’ve been projecting the image of Princess Leia using a consumer-grade Microsoft Kinect camera that averages 15 frames per second.
For the nitty-gritty, there’s more from the MIT Media Lab. The ultimate goal is to create a consumer product that enhances the traditional 3-D experience.
“Really, the focus of our work in digital holography — and I think this makes us pretty much unique among the very small community of people in the world even doing holovideo — is that we’re trying to make a consumer product,” MIT researcher Michael Bove said in a prepared statement.
He added: “So we’ve been saying, ‘How do you make it as cheap as possible — take advantage of hardware and standards and software and everything else that already exists?’ Because that’s the quickest way to bring it to market.”
There’s more in the MIT video posted below.