Zebra Imaging is holding a contest, conveniently wrapping up just before the Esri Federal GIS event in Washington, D.C, that gives all of you Geospatial folks a chance to win your data frames in a 2-foot square holographic print.
Each entry will be reviewed by a panel of Zebra Imaging judges for the following:
Creativity
Design efficiency
Technical complexity
Usefulness of application
Zebra Imaging will select three winners from the following industries: Public Safety, Planning, and Defense.
Winners of the challenge will receive a 24″ x 24″ 3D holographic print of their data and an illumination stand. The winning concepts will be displayed at the Zebra Imaging Booth at the Esri International User Conference the week of July 23, 2012 in San Diego, CA.
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has just completed a 5-year project called “Urban Photonic Sandtable Display”, or UPSD, that creates realtime, color, 360-degree 3D holographic displays. Without any special goggles, an entire team of planners can view a large-format (up to 6-foot diagonal) interactive 3D display.
UPSD is based on full-parallax technology, which enables each 3D holographic object to project the correct amount of light that the original object possessed in each direction, for full 360- degree viewing. Current 3D displays lack full-parallax and only provide 3D viewing from certain angles with typically only three to four inches of visual depth.
Looks like the technology was developed by Zebra Imaging, and is currently being deployed to an Air Force lab and two Army labs for use.
We first brought you news of Zebra Imaging’s holographic prints back in February, but Engadget just dug up two impressive new video demonstrations of their products and a few interesting numbers on the company.
To date, over 8,000 ZScapes have already been developed for the US military, but surprisingly their prices range between $1,500 for a 12- x 18-inch version to $3,500 for the largest 2- x 3-foot size, making them relatively obtainable for those not on Defense Department tabs.
So, 8000 ZScapes at the minimum price ($1500) = $12Million. Not a bad chunk of change. See the videos below.
At the recent Autodesk University 2009, Zebra Imaging was on hand demonstrating their plastic hologram technology that can, supposedly, take any 3D model and render it as a 3D hologram onto a simple piece of plastic. Their website gives some basic information on how they do it:
Patented advances in lasers, optics and image processing are incorporated into Zebra’s innovative process to produce holographic imagery from 3D data sets. Raw data sources of any kind, such as CAD models, laser scans and satellite imagery are used to product the final holographic image. Each hardcopy digital hologram is composed of thousands of high fidelity rendered still images. The images are encoded into a “hogel” (the equivalent of a holographic pixel) on photopolymer film with a proprietary optical process. The result is a portable film based hologram that can be viewed in direct sunlight or with a simple halogen or LED light source.
Sounds too good to be true, but the video taken from the conference floor shows amazing results. While they are not animated, you easily see multiple viewpoints from multiple angles without the need for any special glasses.
Zebra Imaging is holding a contest, conveniently wrapping up just before the Esri Federal GIS event in Washington, D.C, that gives all of you Geospatial folks a chance to win your data frames in a 2-foot square holographic print.
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has just completed a 5-year project called “Urban Photonic Sandtable Display”, or UPSD, that creates realtime, color, 360-degree 3D holographic displays. Without any special goggles, an entire team of planners can view a large-format (up to 6-foot diagonal) interactive 3D display.
We first brought you news of Zebra Imaging’s holographic prints 
At the recent Autodesk University 2009, Zebra Imaging was on hand demonstrating their plastic hologram technology that can, supposedly, take any 3D model and render it as a 3D hologram onto a simple piece of plastic. Their website gives some basic information on how they do it:
VizWorld.com 
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