The retina contains two different types of photosensors -- rods and cones. Rods are very low resolution -- they mostly detect motion, and cannot detect color. Cones detect color. Interestingly, the rods and cones are not evenly distributed on the retina. The vast majority of the cones are concentrated in a little tiny spot near the middle of the retina, and they are responsible for the phenomenon of high resolution color vision. When you look straight at something, that's the part of your retina that you are using -- the high resolution patch right in the middle.

Outside of that tiny little center patch, your retina has much lower resolution, but better peripheral vision and motion detection.

Try this -- focus your eyes on the first letter of a paragraph of text, and, keeping your eye focused straight on that first letter , try and read the paragraph. You'll find that, even though the entire paragraph is within your field of vision, your brain cannot resolve detail outside of an extremely narrow range -- about 15 degrees.

Here is an excellent page describing the details of this phenomenon:
http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/vision/retina.html#c2

How could this phenemonon be exploited in creating a display technology that is both beyond photo-realistic (reality-realistic?), and also computationally feasable?

One possible approach to designing an "immersive" simulation that is indistinguishable from reality would be to design a system that tracks the eyeball, so it "knows where you are looking", and continually presents an extremely high resolution image only where needed -- in the fovea centralis, while presenting a lower-resolution image in the peripheral vision. So instead of having to render some 200 degrees of ultra-high resolution graphics, the system would only need to render a 15 degree view in ultra-high resolution, and could render the rest on a lower resolution.

Of course, this is all speculative, but I think that it's worth keeping in mind that visual perception is non-linear, and the non-linearity of the human eye is an underexploited factor in display technology.

The intrinsic structure of film provides a natural "brute force" solution to the problem of image representation by providing very high resolution across the entire image -- an effective resolution of, as Greg said, some 13 megapixels,

But the sharp "sweet spot" in the eye only contains some 30,000 cones, which corresponds to a resolution of only 173 x 173. This is VERY low resolution.

So here's a proposed immersive VR system --

A low to medium resolution image, filling the complete 200 degree visual field, with an extremely high resolution "spot" superimposed on the low resolution image, where the location of the high resolution spot is determined by tracking the motion of the eyeball.

You might be able to get away with numbers like, 256x256 for the high resolution spot, and 1024x1024 for the low resolution field.

Before, I was thinking that teleimersion was intended for use in presenting movies,etc. Actually its main use is for teleconferencing, although the article didn't rule out the possibility that it could be used for other things like medical research and ultimately, movies, I suppose.

Still, the article mainly looks at what the future of the technology might hold. Right now, they are using 6 or 7 video cameras, large video displays and either a pair of polarized glasses or a head mounted display. He also mentioned the use of a "computer glove".

The article talks about handling a three-way conference. It says, "Roughly speaking, a cluster of eight two gigahertz Pentium processors with shared memory should be able to process a trio [using 7 cameras] in approximately real time." It is estimated that, "Conveying a single person at a desk, without the surrounding room, at a slow rate of about two frames per second has proved to require about 20 megabits per second but with up to 80-megabit-per-second peaks."

Yes, there's a long way to go but the article gives a good look at the state of the art and the hopes of things to come.

May I add this -- there's a tolerably good possibility that many of us will live to be several hundred years old. Certain of us already are, the first century is the hardest; but that's another story. Thus we will see what you have described come to pass.

This will be just one of the benefits of genetic research and the mapping of the human genome. The biological clock will first be stopped, and then gradually reversed. Cloning technologies will eventually produce such mundane things as a new replacement heart and other knick-knacks.

However death can still occur as a result of an accident if we aren't careful: such as going off the road into a ditch on the way to an Elvis sighting somewhere in the middle of the next century.

Remember that we do not actually "see" anything. We "see" the light that is reflected off of the objects around us, and this light is slightly different between eyes, do to the spacing of our eyes. Since the principle of 3D photography involved controlling the light that hits the eyes to simulate how we see, no real 3D process will work unless you can control the light that arrives at each eye individually. At present time, this can not be done from the screen, it needs to be at the eye.

The 3D projection in Disney's Haunted House is a great gimick, but it is a trickery that is not transportable to general purpose presentations.

 |  IP: Logged

With Field Programmable Gate Arrays, or FPGA's (computers that can reporgram themeselves and literally evolve) are already in use at NASA and being improved upon constantly. Read more, its educational: http://www.newsobserver.com/monday/business/Story/419010p-414835c.html
These kind of computers can solve the tasks that we would normally have to throw server farms at.
Like I said to begin with, kinda, this is just another example of Star Trek becoming reality. Did anyone ever doubt it?

------------------
Jonathan Haglund
Edwards Theatre Circuit, Inc
Park Place 10

Computers are used to design and optimize computers. Some circuits in a processor may be entirely computer designed and generated. Technology is fascinating.

For example, using a CAD type schematic drawing program, you could draw a circuit of logic devices like AND, OR gates, flip-flops, shift registers, etc. to perform some function (no analog stuff like caps or resistors.) Then, copy that circuit into the gate array.

The gate array itself is an IC with a bunch of pins on it (you buy the size you need to fit your curcuit in.) It's not uncommon for a gate array to have over 500 pins on it.

You load a gate array somewhat like "flashing" an EPROM. It can be "erased" and reprogrammed if you want to change the logic. It operates much faster than an EPROM, so it can used where processing a signal through a microprocessor isn't fast enough or you want to save space by combining everything in one big chip.

That article make it seem like FPGA are new and leading edge technology. They are neat stuff, but have been around for about 10 years. Before that, there were simplified chips called PAL's (programmable array logic) and other similar chips (FPLS's; field programmable logic sequencers) that did much the same thing, but were smaller and could only be burned once.

One of the three novels dealt with a planet which had only about 400 people, each with 10's thousands of robots who did all the work. The "holodeck" process here was a wall of great complexity requiring a platoon of robots on each end twirling dials and adjusting to keep it working. Never did any of the people see each other in person, the distances were too great, but they visited constantly this way.

At the rate technology is moving today, I think none of us can say that "anything" is "impossible." 10-Gig computer processors are just around the corner.