Fairy Lights in Femtoseconds: Tangible Holographic Plasma (SIGGRAPH)

Yoichi Ochiai · 1.1M views · 2015-06-22 · 3:20

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Overview

A SIGGRAPH demo from Yoichi Ochiai's group of aerial and volumetric graphics drawn by focused femtosecond lasers with computational holography. The plasma points can be touched.

On Hacker News

Linked as the demo behind femtosecond plasma displays, often noting the touch burns skin and the system is loud.

Discussed on HN; no positive recommendation is recorded in this export · HN mentions 2015–2024

Topics

Computer graphics & rendering VR, AR & spatial computing

What people said

jcims · 2024-05 · Reference
This page has been around for a while. If you watch the YouTube video, you can see the skin on the person’s finger get burnt as they touch the little tiny plasma balls. [VIDEO]
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jcims · 2019-03 · Reference
Like these but less plasma? [VIDEO] My favorite part of this is looking at all the toasted skin on the fingertips in the video.
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AndrewKemendo · 2018-01 · Reference
Using the term thin air is misleading IMO. I saw a slightly different version of this a few years ago [1]. It basically used pulsed laser to create plasma at certain x,y,z without any additional reflective medium added to the environment. However it's crazy loud [2]. From the Nature paper [3] it seems to work on similar principles with the drawback that you need "light scattering (or absorbing and generating) surfaces" instead of free air. In other words you still need some medium for projection/reflection, like a smoke cloud for example: "it is unlikely that the display would function outdoors without an enclosure unless particles were much more strongly confined or steps were taken to refresh trapped particles regularly" [1] [VIDEO] [2] [LINK] [3] [LINK]
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Sources

Video by Yoichi Ochiai, played through YouTube.

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