Get best of the week

3D image monitor

An engineer dealing with the problem of three-dimensional raster images turned to us with a request to invest in his project. He needed about 2 million rubles to buy a high-precision milling machine, materials and several months of wages for him and his assistant.

He wanted to create a light panel with many tiny light sources. The technology was as follows: small points-scratches are applied to organic glass in a certain order, and LED backlighting is used from the end. Next, a film with a cellular image is superimposed on the glass, which must very exactly coincide with the light sources. Rays passing through the film were supposed to form a three-dimensional image.



And it really happened. A volumetric image appeared on the plate, and it was possible to look at it in different planes, moving it both horizontally and vertically. This technology was different from lenticular printing and vario-paintings.

Allocated money quickly ended. We talked about this project to several investors, who, laughing, said that for serious R&D it is necessary not at least 2, but at least 100 million rubles.

Then our engineer took up the work. Before that, he had not worked for about 10 years, reaping the fruits of his first creation.

Within two months, he created software for modeling three-dimensional images and translating them on a plane. A common drawback of the technology itself was that a clear picture was formed closer to the screen, and if the object greatly went beyond it or in depth, the image was somewhat blurred.



The new way to work with the image was about 10 times cheaper. The engineer took a large-format inkjet printer and printed on it a film with a black fill, leaving small translucent dots on it. By superposing two such films on top of each other, I got a material that uniformly formed many point sources of light. It was necessary only on one side to direct bright radiation at it.

After that, instead of a color film, the LCD screen was taken from a conventional monitor. By creating powerful LED lighting on the back of the dot film, we got small light sources that can shine through the LCD screen like a film. Thus, we got a dynamic three-dimensional image on the monitor.

The software allowed to process 3D-models of various most popular formats. It was possible to form moving objects. All R&D (instead of 100 million rubles) cost us 3 months of work as an engineer and about 100 thousand rubles.

However, we still failed to get a high-quality image. To do this, it would be necessary to reduce the size of light sources by several times, without losing the radiation power. The project was abandoned, and our 3D monitor went to gather dust in a warehouse.



Perhaps he is just waiting in the wings.

More articles:


All Articles