I’ve already talked about the Virtual Showcase, created by a team of teachers and students of the ESIEA french engineering school, and I’ve also had the chance to test it : it rocks ! It’s elegant, it’s lowcost and it just works.

Marc Lerenard, ESIEA teacher and VR expert has sent me two new videos of the project:

This version is monoscopic, but they’re also working on an anaglyph and active stereoscopy version.

The only remaining problem, as for any VR application, is that the required head tracking takes some space (you don’t see that but there are at least six Optitrack cameras dispatched around) and that for the stereoscopic version you would need glasses. You wouldn’t be able to do that with four autostereoscopic screens since their viewing range is too small and they only have horizontal parallax.

Other solutions like the Holopub by french company BeInRelief exist :

Although it’s totally not holographic (I hate that when ‘holography’ is misused as it is 99% of the time!!), it’s a pretty cool marketing solution : a screen, a semi-transparent mirror, and you’re done !  No glasses, no tracking, illusion of depth (no stereoscopy, no parallax), integration of 3d images on top of a physical object.

We’re in the future baby!