Open-Source volumetric display

[Dinesh]

xcept for selfmade LED-3D cubes there is no way I can get my hands on something like a volumetric display or even a electro-holographic one.
They simply don't exist as finished, buyable products (..well for under 50'000 or 100'000$) .

Well, it does depend on what you mean by "volumetric display". You can get one of these ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zgcKKgQPjuw ) for less than a 1000. But, this is not a "digital" (though digital data has gone towards making it), computerised or electronic display, except insofar as there's a led to illuminate and a motor to rotate.

It's probably called "HoloDome" because everybody (except real holographers and researchers working on this kind of display tech) would and will call this a hologram. In the mind of most people everything which seems to be 3D and floating in air is a hologram.

Precisely! To my mind "it" is not "called" a holodome, the originators of the device are calling it a HoloDome. Perhaps, to invoke the very same association you mention.

So if their kickstarter thing works out...

And, do you suppose that the chances of it working out may be because of the association with holograms? Would it be a reasonable assumption that the interest in this device might not be the same if they'd called it a "VoxelDome", "Floating Image Device" or "3D ProjectorDome".

Don't get me wrong, they can call it whatever they like, and the public at large can react to it in whatever manner they choose to. If this kickstarter works out, then they will have pulled off a successful mass marketing scheme, and more power to them. I've long since given up on the idea that the public at large has any ability to think analytically or indulge in any critical thinking. The kind of advertising and marketing you see nowadays and the public response to it are overwhelming evidence of this. I actually saw, would you believe it, an ad for "e-Ice Cream"! You're supposed to download ice cream now?!

My point is, no holographer seems to have picked up on the word "HoloDome'. It's only when something "holographic" goes viral in the media that the holographers respond, as if to add to the virality of it all by taking an apparently anti-viral position. The statement that the emperor has no clothes is today an attempt by people simply to draw attention to themselves - an antiviral, viralised statement. But, when something "holographic" has not hit the media in a big way, there is silence from the community. However, there are a lot more of "them" than there are of us and the emperor can afford to ignore the few that state he has no clothes, because those praising the finery of his attire far outnumber those that state his lack of attire! If someone had pointed out that he had no clothes the moment he left the castle, the message might have had a chance to be acted on.

The result of all this is to mutate, then completely change the meaning of the word "holography". By not speaking out early, I believe that the holographic community at large has abrogated it's chance to stop this change. The word will evolve and change, there's no way of stopping this evolution. Holographers can either accept the change and adapt to it or get left behind, constantly living in a netherworld of the Glorious Past 40 years ago! We will be assimilated, resistance is useless!

[PinkysBrain]

By the way, Pinky, apropos of the physicists/chemists and mathematician comment, I assume you're implying that the vocabulary and/or the jargon mean different things in these different disciplines. Well, yes and no.

No I meant that one was most likely to be talking about Shannon entropy, one about thermodynamic entropy and one about as likely to be talking about one as the other (with a slight twist) ... and all as likely as not without further qualification leaving it up to the reader or listener to figure it out based on context. Which they would easily be able to do because they share domain knowledge, just like domain knowledge makes the term volumetric displays mean something ...

More even than domain knowledge though the most important thing to communication in science or otherwise is good will and effort.

[Dinesh]

Well, it's true that different disciplines have different vocabularies and so the meaning of any specific term is relative to the context. Isn't this true also of language? For example, the word POLISH can refer to someone from Poland, in which case it's pronounced POELISH, or it can refer to shining something, in which it's pronounced PAWLISH. Simply seeing the word with no context gives no clue as to the pronunciation.

In the sciences, the problem arises between the technical description of a word, the popular metaphor of the word and the engineering metaphor for the word. However, there is usually a connection between the various meanings and, usually, the connection is mathematical. While popular usage has caused a divergence of the terms into a specialised vocabulary, the core meanings are still the same. Take your word 'entropy', for example. The term was first coined by Clausius in trying to resolve a conflict between Thompson and Joule in the analysis of the Carnot cycle. Clausius realised that, in addition to the two temperatures in a Carnot cycle, a third temperature was required and also the concept of reversibility had to be taken into account. The Carnot cycle did not address reversibility (There's a fairly rich histroy behind the Carnot cycle as well, but that's a story for another time). So, he created the term "entropy" and defined it as S = dQ/T in 1856. Boltzmann, some twenty years later, reformulated Clausius' definition into the Boltzmann equation S = k*ln(W), where W was the number of permutations of reconstituting a macrosystem from elemental microsystems. Now, it's evident that the greater the number of permutations, the more disordered, or chaotic, the microsystem is. Thus, if you break a plate in two, there is only one way to reconstitute the plate: join the two halves together, and so W=1. But, if you break a plate into a thousand pieces, you can start reconstituting it in a thousand different ways and there's 1000! ways to reconstitute the entire plate. So W = 1000! So, the plate broken into a thousand pieces is more "disordered" than the plate broken into two and its entropy is greater. Thus 'entropy' came to becoming a metaphor for order; the greater the entropy, the greater the disorder of the system - the more chaotic it was. At any rate, Gibbs later transformed the Boltzmann definition of entropy {S = k*ln(W)} into S = K* <sum>p*ln(p) in which form it got absorbed into quantum statistics. In 1948, Shannon, at Bell labs was trying to quantify the "uncertainty" in information transfer. In this regard, he came up with the H function, which related lost information in a communication channel. In his seminal paper on information theory he states this H function as H = <sum>p*ln(p). The story goes that he wanted to call the H function "uncertainty", but he was talking to Von Neumann, who at once saw the connection to the Gibb's formulation of entropy and the quantum statistical formulation. So, he suggested that Shannon call it 'entropy'. The rest, as they say, is history.

[PinkysBrain]

Those markov chain generators just get better and weirder all the time.

[Dinesh]

Never thought of it as a Markov chain. My first reaction was: "No this isn't a Markov chain". Then, "Wait, maybe it is". Then, "Can a Markov chain be a fractal? Can the next iteration of a Markov chain only be valid if it falls within certain bounds. What is 'valid'? " Perhaps this can this explain why the laws of nature are mathematical.