Holograms, 3D Movies and Social DVDs

Institute for Creative Technologies: demonstration of 3D teleconference setup at the 2008 Army Science Conference.


WSJ on Monday ran "The Way We'll Watch", a special section report exploring the near future of vide entertainment. Among innovations making their way into the market are bigger screens, smoother picture, and social DVDs -- chat with others who watch the same movie and are not in the same living room -- powered by Sony's BD-Live ("the text goes in a box over a portion of the screen").

Other tech coolness: kiosks that burn movies onto portable memory, 3D movie theaters, and holograms: "And entertainment futurists are always thinking ahead. For example, engineers are working on affordable, large-scale hologram images. Last week, at a Florida conference, the Institute for Creative Technologies showed off a hologram-like image of an animated head that held conversations with bystanders as they walked by. It's not hard to imagine a time when holograms will be able to move around a room in a lifelike way -- and possibly end up as part of the movie-theater experience."

This WSJ's work is important not because it discovers something new -- most of the stuff has been talked about for years -- but because it finally lends legitimacy to all this tech and puts it in front of the folks in corporate boardrooms.

Video report follows.