Sunday, April 22, 2007

Holographic Globular Cluster

The third installation of our exhibition was based on our research about 3D Gravitational agents. The idea was to show some results of our simulations in 3D. We used two big LCD screens to display an introduction on emergent patterns at differents scales in the universe and the evolution of a globular cluster from a random distribution of matter. Pascal Gauchet of the Holographic Lab. in Paris has given us the opportunity to use an holographic station for experiments. The image shows the resulting installation where the user can see an hologram of a globular cluster turning around just in front of his eyes.
Then, with one hand, the user was able to virtually "grap" the hologram and select the image he wanted to see on the left screen by turning the hologram in the desired direction. This sort of "holographic mouse" used a webcam and a simple image processing program to detect the hand movement. It worked quite well when well calibrated. The main prolem with this webcam solution is that a small change in light condition can affect the quality of the resulting behavior. I think that an infrared grid could be a more robust solution...