Voxon: Real time interactive volumetric holograms

https://www.voxon.co

by lastdong • 2 years ago

173 69 2 years ago

frabert• 2 years ago

I believe Ken Silverman of Build engine fame works (or used to work) at this

echelon• 2 years ago

It feels like we might be getting to the early era of practical volumetric displays. These are priced appropriately for companies to use at trade shows and advertising booths. As more money flows into this field, hopefully innovation will accelerate and the tech will become high definition, cheap, and widely available.

isx726552• 2 years ago

Is this an actual hologram in the traditional sense or LEDs on a spinning armature? From the FAQ it sounds like the latter, but the site isn’t quite clear on that.

journeyman18• 2 years ago

It's a rotating matrix; see the "What makes the Voxon VX2 different from other 3D displays?" section of the FAQ

gorkish5• 2 years ago

Hot take, but once the novelty wears off, POV LED displays like this just look like absolute garbage and are uselessly low resolution.

Before LEDs this type of volumetric display originally rotated a helical or tilted projection surface and used a projector which allowed the entire volume to be scanned once or twice during each rotation. This had the advantage of looking more continuous, being higher resolution, and being less expensive.

I personally thought laser based picoprojectors (of the "focus free" type) were going to explode the market for small and cheap volumetric displays, but for some reason the tech never made it out of a few weird niche products.

Ultimately I concluded that volumetric displays simply don't have a great practical application *except for* the novelty. Is anyone using such a display professionally for an actual practical purpose?

fxtentacle4• 2 years ago

It sounds like they tried projectors and then pivoted to VLED.

"the Voxon VX1, a device that uses ultra-high-speed video projection to display slices of a 3D scene onto a reciprocating 2D glass plane"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CCuybyAO8fs

gorkish5• 2 years ago

Yes I think I actually spotted this in their video demo where you will notice one of the displays looks way way way better than the rest of them. That would be a projector one.

It is considerably easier to achieve sync and high framerates with LED i would expect. There are also some dedicated chips coming to the market to drive stuff like those POV video signs that are now available on aliexpress for a song.

andybak• 2 years ago

look like absolute garbage and are uselessly low resolution.

I wish you'd chosen a different tone

Plenty of things are low resolution, flawed, impractical and lacking in fidelity and still look gorgeous. In fact - people are drawn towards things that have these kind of qualities. Some of it is nostalgia, some of it is that the flaws add a quality and richness of their own. People spend a lot of time and money trying to recreate older technologies because of these aspects. The examples are too numerous to list.

I wouldn't have quibbled if you'd chosen words that didn't come across as sneering. I think there's a core validity to what you're saying but it's just the way you said it.

gorkish5• 2 years ago

Sorry, but I will continue to disagree. For a $6500 device the quality, resolution, and spatial continuity is utterly unacceptable. As a DIY project or a product that is price aligned with other LED POV products with similar BoM costs I would be more willing to agree with you.

fxtentacle4• 2 years ago

It's a LED matrix spinning at 15 RPS. That's why animations are a bit jittery and why the center is always darker / not illuminated. That said, their examples with anti-aliasing look amazing. I'd say this will be a great tool for doctors to analyze x-ray / CT data.

krisoft• 2 years ago

why the center is always darker / not illuminated

I don’t understand that part. Why is that? I’m familiar with the theory of persistence of vision displays, or so i thought. Wouldn’t the center be brighter denser rather than darker? If you have the same led density but the leds “move less” because of the lower radius that is what i would expect. What am I thinking wrong?

xnx• 2 years ago

I agree with your reasoning, but in this case I think the dark area might be because they don't mount LEDs on the center axle.

fxtentacle4• 2 years ago

I believe there is a plate with LEDs on both sides that is rotating. When you look at that plate from the side, it obscures the stuff behind it. That's why you see more "shadow" the closer you get to the center. In this video, you can see the effect:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2I0sjF9NuTU

Around the 10 seconds mark, the camera rotates around the display and then you can see a glowing laptop screen move behind the VX2. And there you can see that the center of the VX2 has something blurry but solid which obscures the background. That's the rotating plate with the LEDs on it, I believe.

ticklemyelmo• 2 years ago

Image quality is extremely important for medical image analysis. A flickering low resolution display is the last thing you'd want a doctor looking at.

teapot7• 2 years ago

Thanks - I got annoyed with their site for not (as far as I noticed anyway) mention what their gadget actually was.

cmcconomy• 2 years ago

this seems like a great improvement on what I've seen before, I imagine one day the quality will meet minimum consumer needs

ekianjo• 2 years ago

Seen it IRL it's a fascinating piece of equipment. There is nothing like it

lagrange77• 2 years ago

What makes it better than any other rotating LED matrix POV display?

rockemsockem• 2 years ago

I initially thought interactive meant you could "touch" the hologram and have some programmed response occur, but it sounds like it just means you can interact with it via a computer and touching it would immediately stop the spinning display :/. Pretty cool though.

I think these spinning displays ultimately won't catch on for very many uses since you can't actually interact with them, but for public exhibits and other uses where you just want to see a 3D image that changes it could be cool.

CSSer• 2 years ago

Does comfort beat out detail? It seems like AR, of any stripe, can do better.

An LED matrix seems fairly fragile and very time-consuming to assemble. I'm not an expert. Could the price come down over time? I'm having difficulty imagining the market fit. I don't mean to sound too negative. It does look very cool! I'd love to see it in person.

cyberax• 2 years ago

Does comfort beat out detail? It seems like AR, of any stripe, can do better.

No. AR is limited to one focal plane (HUD instead of full 3D), unless you want to round-trip the entire image through the goggles.

stonemetal12• 2 years ago

As a v0.1 it seems great. Reminds me of the jaws ad in Back to the Future 2. Mall advertising is probably the only thing it is suitable for now. As it gets higher res I could see it replacing TVs.

It seems like AR, of any stripe, can do better.

Only if everyone in the group has AR goggles, I could see this being better for group activities where everyone can be around and reference the same "thing".

rgmerk• 2 years ago

Closer to the projection of Leia at the start of Star Wars, I would have said.

Either way, pretty cool, but I don't see it replacing TVs any time soon.

elicash• 2 years ago

Does comfort beat out detail? It seems like AR, of any stripe, can do better.

I don't think there are only two options here. There are other approaches like Google Starline.

unwind3• 2 years ago

LEDs are surface-mount [1] and handled by pick-and-place machines [2], so I don't think they are particularly time-consuming to assemble.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surface-mount_technology

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pick-and-place_machine

mrandish• 2 years ago

It's neat and all but I can't help being skeptical that, beyond certain narrowly specific use cases, volumetric displays like this will measurably increase actual utility enough to be worth the increased cost, size, weight, power and complexity. I'm assuming "utility" here to be something like "usefully actionable increased comprehension of a 3D object or terrain".

My reasoning is that the human visual system already has a bunch of neural wetware that's evolved to be really good at turning visual cues like highlights, shadows, reflections, specularity, depth of field, etc from a 2D scene into an internal 3D representation. When you add extra cues over time like object/light source motion, moving POV and parallax it gets even better. And all those cues are already "free" with common 2D displays + motion. Adding a bit of additional hardware to 2D commodity displays enables things like stereo binocular views from 3D glasses, head tracking and interactive control which further deepen scene comprehension at only slightly more cost, space and complexity. That's a lot of pre-existing, cheaper, easier alternatives that are as good as volumetric displays for most use cases and nearly as good for the remaining use cases.

Beyond a few specialty use cases, research labs and military trials, I suspect the majority of these displays will be deployed as a novelty to attract attention or as social signaling (eg trade show booths, high-end retail, corporate hospitality, etc). Unfortunately, those kinds of use cases tend to have a shelf life only about as long as the novelty and high early adopter prices last.

PaulHoule• 2 years ago

It competes with many different things.

On one hand there are light field displays like https://lookingglassfactory.com/ not to mention plain stereoscopic displays as in the Nintendo 3DS and maybe someday synthetic hologram displays that do the same thing as the light field displays except using a wave interpretation of light as opposed to a ray.

Then there are various headsets such as the MQ3, Vision Pro (basically VR with some video passthrough) and the other kind such as Hololens, Magic Leap that have an optical combiner.

For that matter you can make a 3-d print of an object that you want to inspect.

Practically they stand or fall together on being able to exchange content, there is no "3d economy" unless I can make a model with some standard format and view it with all of those displays.

jcims• 2 years ago

It feels like this is the barrier to that 3D economy. The width of an iphone is approximately the interpupil distance of an average adult, moving one camera to the other side would make stereoscopic image/video capture a widespread capability. It just lacks an application.

beardedhog• 2 years ago

Here's a cool (mostly) 3D-printed realization of a similar concept: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pcAEqbYwixU The author just released the mechanical assembly as .step file (https://github.com/AncientJames/VortexParts), and plans on releasing the firmware in the near future. And yes, it can run Doom!

dr_kiszonka2• 2 years ago

Very cool! Do you know what LED matrix it is? I am trying to estimate the BOM cost.

panki27• 2 years ago

It says that in the README:

"The frame holds two P1.875 128x64 LED panels"

P1.875 refers to the pitch (distance between LEDs), seems to be a standard HUB75 panel.

okso• 2 years ago

Would a transparent OLED display not provide a better visual quality ?

unwind3• 2 years ago

I would expect that to break the "visible from any angle" feature, as you would see the image in reverse from the other side of the circle?

krunck• 2 years ago

I wonder if the glass container the spinning armature is in has a vacuum to help reduce air drag and thus power requirements(and maybe noise?)

martyvis• 2 years ago

I wonder how noisy it is - it would have been good to include in the specs.

willVoxon3• 2 years ago

No, the enclosure keeps the air contained and moving at a constant rate with the armature. The only noise comes from the brushless motor, which is under 50dB at 1m.

mhalle4• 2 years ago

This device is a volumetric display, similar in product placement (if not exactly the same illumination technology) to the volumetric dome display from Actuality Systems about 20 years ago.

Volumetric displays have their place, but they can't display general occlusion of far objects by near objects. That restricts their application to non-photorealistic scenes that often look like clouds of points.

Since occlusion is one of our strongest depth senses (much stronger than stereopsis), that's a significant restriction.

Big spinny things are also hard to scale.

While other autostereoscopic display technologies like the parallax barrier displays from Looking Glass Factory give up the ability to walk around the scene, they work with no moving parts and can display photorealistic scenes (either synthetic or photographic).

Again, different display technologies have their place, but volumetric displays have historically struggled to compete in the 3D display market.

jtxt• 2 years ago

Occlusion could be done with head tracking for one observer (not both eyes though); but defeats the point. I'm guessing AR glasses will work for much of this.

nine_k• 2 years ago

So, they show mostly correct applications: CAD / 3D-modeling work, schematic visualizations, etc.

Also, for an individual seated user, it's relatively easy to adjust the direction of gaze, and do occlusion at the rendering level, giving a rough idea of occlusion. They even show it in one of the segments of the video on the product page (with some color balls).

mhalle4• 2 years ago

Sure, it's possible to approximate occlusion for a fixed viewer. At that point, though, the display is competing with displays like looking glass (lenticular, parallax barrier, or stereograms) that are higher resolution, cheaper, and have a rendering pipeline that's more compatible with standard computer graphics.

zimpenfish• 2 years ago

Big spinny things are also hard to scale.

I worked for people that were making these kinds of things (in 2009-10[0]) for advertising (8ft high, 6ft diameter spinning cylinder[1]; 8ft high, 4ft wide flat display with 8 interconnected spinning discs) and yeah, they were absolutely terrifying. Especially the flat display - sounded like a jet taking off when starting up and wasn't much quieter at full pelt[2].

[0] I suspect these things are easier now with lower power LEDS, etc. given you can cover a cylinder in directly addressable LEDs pretty cheaply and don't need the massive spinning death machine.

[1] Deployed at a few places around the UK but now sadly removed.

[2] They were intended for roadside displays, not shopping malls.

thih9• 2 years ago

About “can't display general occlusion”, wikipedia calls this a misconception. But it does later state that it requires sacrificing vertical parallax.

It is often claimed that volumetric displays are incapable of reconstructing scenes with viewer-position-dependent effects, such as occlusion and opacity. This is a misconception; a display whose voxels have non-isotropic radiation profiles are indeed able to depict position-dependent effects.
the ability to reconstruct scenes with occlusion and other position-dependent effects have been at the expense of vertical parallax, in that the 3D scene appears distorted if viewed from locations other than those the scene was generated for.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volumetric_display

zardo• 2 years ago

This is a misconception; a display whose voxels have non-isotropic radiation profiles are indeed able to depict position-dependent effects.

Sure, if you replace each pixel with a tiny light field display pixel you can do occlusion.

mhalle4• 2 years ago

"non-isotropic radiation profiles" is probably better expressed as the ability to produce light that can be modulated differently in different directions. That's what's required to show proper view dependent shading on a surface, and what's required to turn off a voxel that's behind another voxel from a particular view angle.

That's arguably a different class of display, and an extremely complex one.

To build it you'd likely want to sacrifice vertical parallax (to allow the use of a spinning lenticular sheet or something else, and to reduce the information capacity required), but there's no fundamental reason that prevents a full parallax display of this type (a spinning integral photograph).

From an engineering complexity point of view, it's the hardest of all worlds.

TeeMassive• 2 years ago

I think this is what most people here are looking for:

The volumetric display area created by the Voxon VX2 is a cylindrical space measuring 256mm in diameter and 256mm in height. This space is filled with the 3D image generated by the rotating LED array.

naruhodo• 2 years ago

Actually, I was looking for the resolution and I can't find that anywhere on the page or in the FAQs.

brcmthrowaway2• 2 years ago

There was a crazy british guy who made a smaller candle version of this, no?

unwind3• 2 years ago

Yes, mitxela [1] is nuts.

[1] https://mitxela.com/projects/candle

_dain_• 2 years ago

What are these like for people with epilepsy or other sensitivities to rapid visual strobing?

nirav72• 2 years ago

These seem fine for ads and signage. Some airports have them above the TSA checkpoints. But can’t see how useful they would be for using this as a display to view complex 3d objects.

owenpalmer• 2 years ago

Help me Obi Wan Kenobi

kivlor• 2 years ago

I came across this similar DIY build on YT recently - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pcAEqbYwixU

The tech is interesting but I can't see the practical uses just yet :)

ggm• 2 years ago

15 FPS looks low. Is there a reason they can't switch an LED fast enough to get both persistance of vision AND a higher framerate?

corysama• 2 years ago

Probably has more to do with the physical force involved in spinning the LEDs.

throwaway073885• 2 years ago

I was a massive doubter (like a few of the folks here) when I met co-founder Gavin 8ish years ago.

Unlike many of the other founders in our little startup ecosystem, he and Will have stuck with it long term, and I’ve watched from afar as this project has grown, technically and commercially to what it is today.

From the outset, this project appeared to be doomed. The earliest iterations of their product seemed far too limited to be of any use (The view area was hardly bigger than a large grapefruit, the enclosure was massive, and the resolution/clarity was … not great), and speaking of use, who would need such a thing?

Against all odds, they’ve prevailed. The hardware is way better, the integrations have improved significantly, and while I’m still not sure what their customer are using this for, clearly there’s enough revenue coming in that they can retain a team of software engineers (they were hiring recently too).

This is speculation but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was mainly or even entirely bootstrapped with the exception of one or two government/university grants.

They’re not even based out of a “good” city for entrepreneurship, Adelaide (as much as I love it) is not exactly known as a hotbed of innovation.

This product shouldn’t exist, and yet it does. It’s almost like they’ve willed it into existence. I’m not sure if it’s passion or persistence, but I have to admire how they’ve stuck with it, defied the odds, built a business and turned sci-fi into reality.

I’d bet good money that they’ll still be here, growing in 10 years time.

P.s. I don’t know if he’s still there but Ken Silverman was/is on the team (He's the creator of Duke Nukem 3D's Build Engine and is highly regarded by John Carmack)

nmfisher• 2 years ago

Oh wow, I'm from Adelaide originally and didn't know they where based there too (in my defence, I haven't lived there in 10+ years). Maybe I'll try and drop in and say hello when I'm back.

willVoxon3• 2 years ago

Thanks mate! This post made my day!! Yes, we're pretty much bootstrapped and yes, Ken's still with us.

pdntspa• 2 years ago

What's the progress on real, Star Wars style holograms? Or have we determined those to be a technical impossibility?

maxcruer• 2 years ago

Holodeck here we go!

Vox_Leone• 2 years ago

I've been thinking of a real 3D display for a long time. You see, if two intersecting - colliding - electron beams can produce a real photon and if you consider this a voxel, which it is, then it is possible to build a volumetric display with a grid of electron cannons, two of them colliding in the x and y axis and this xy plane being reproduced in the z axis. If you control the beams precisely, fast enough, you could "scan" the grid in all three axes, creating a dynamic 3D image that can be viewed from any angle, much like a 3D printer forms objects layer by layer but in real-time and with light instead of material.

Considerations:

- The accuracy of the electron beam control would be crucial to ensure that photons are produced at the right locations in the 3D grid.

- Energy Requirements: High-energy electron beams would require significant power and advanced beam control systems to generate enough energy to produce visible photons while avoiding issues like scattering.

- This concept would likely require advancements in electron beam control and volumetric display technology to achieve practical use. Similar technologies already exist in areas like cathode ray tube (CRT) displays and electron beam lithography, but extending this to a 3D volumetric display would involve overcoming many technical challenges.

- Beam Interference: Electron beams are highly sensitive to interference, so you'd need precise control over the environment (vacuum, temperature, pressure) to avoid disruptions in the beam path or photon generation.

- Photon Efficiency: Maximizing the number of photons emitted at each intersection is crucial for a bright display. Minimizing scattering losses or inefficiencies in photon emission at beam intersections could be a key challenge.

- Complexity of 3D Grid Setup: Setting up and maintaining a 3D grid of intersecting beams will require precision engineering and calibration. You could explore automated calibration methods, possibly using machine learning to fine-tune the display in real-time.

Isaac443• 2 years ago

Has anyone tried to DIY this tech?

willVoxon3• 2 years ago

Will from Voxon here - ask me anything!

Voxon: Real time interactive volumetric holograms

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