posted on Nov, 7 2012 @ 02:56 PM
Oh, and there's another funny bit you HAVEN'T heard of, or seen. Well, I did see someone blab to Wired but not in detail, they got close to a
description of it though.
You can start with the original setup and sort of turn it inside out. That is, if you look at the system block diagram, you can sort of see how one
became the other.
With that rig, you can arrange a sort of virtual image farther down the beam the way you can look down the beam in time with the original setup. At
the focus, it instantiates virtual photons that mimic a real image elsewhere in the setup, in practice, they showed this thing off at a weapons
conference back in something like 2006, it was set up in a darkened corridor with the works hidden behind a wall, and it looked like there was a guard
at the door, only it was a free-standing image. It had back-face culling but not opacity, which is why the corridor was dark and the walls were dark
grey. But it was pretty convincing until you started picking it apart. It's the best volumetric image without a physical screen I've seen, but it's
not practical. Was probably fun working on though. You also have to keep the dust and aerosols down or you see sparkly dust motes in the beam path, or
the beam itself through aerosol dispersion.