Hunter Scott

Real life Iron Man holographic prototyping

// July 16th, 2010 // Uncategorized

One of my favorite pieces of technology in the movie Iron Man was his holographic prototyping device. He could sketch something out in CAD (in the air) and then manipulate it and test it right then with a hologram. With some new technology (which really isn’t a new technology, just a new idea with old technology), that kind of thing is actually possible.

So here’s how I figure it could be done: constructing things in 3D space could be done with IR LEDs and IR cameras (like the Wii does it). In fact, there are already projects like those by Johnny Lee and lots of others that allow for finger tracking and interactive whiteboards using a Wii remote. It would just be a matter of cleverly placing the IR cameras. The hologram technology already exists to make holograms fairly similar to the ones in the movie. To physically interact with the models, this research would work:

Basically, they use ultrasonic sensors to track motion (which could be improved using the IR tracking mentioned above). Once they know where the virtual object is, they can shoot small, direct streams of air to let you feel the object. Now, this would be weird since it wouldn’t feel very solid, but I think it would help. If your object tracking was good enough, the model would basically snap on your arm (in the case of Tony Stark) once it entered the interactive area. Imagine having a whole photoshop-like program running as a hologram. You could grab and drag parts, extrude, color, render, animate. And it would be the most natural thing. I feel inclined at this point to mention the Sixth Sense project at MIT.

(Here’s the full TED talk about SixthSense)

Imagine walking into a design meeting and everyone puts one of these on. Each team in charge of each part of the project could show off their models and then combine it with other peoples’. The guy who CADed a pair of legs can attach them to the torso designed by another person on another computer. You could then see how the parts would interact without fabricating a single thing. And if something didn’t work, just open up your holographic CAD program right there, make some changes (which I suspect would take much less time than a conventional CAD program because of how natural it would be to interact with) and then try again. You wouldn’t even need powerful computers on your hip, because you could have all of the animation and rendering and stuff being done remotely on a beefy cluster hundreds of miles away. The only technology that doesn’t exist yet in that scenario is a portable holographic projector. But pico projectors like those being used in the Sixth Sense project exist readily and could be used in a similar way. In fact, you could fake a hologram by using existing polarized 3D technology (just have a silvered surface to project on to preserve the polarization and wear polarized glasses). It seems to me that as computer-human interaction develops, we will move away from the traditional square screen with square windows to a method that lets us be more mobile and interact more naturally. I cannot wait for the future, and as an engineer, I get to make the future. I get to develop and test these new systems and explore things and ideas that no one has explored before. It’s going to be so much fun.