Reminds me that there are limitations to volumetric displays—namely that, since you have no idea where the viewer is located, there is no backface culling you can perform. So it seems to work best for "cutaway" views.
I'd like to see one in person. Might be "magical" — the video only kind of hints at this.
lawlessone 6 hours ago [-]
I can see it making a great "radar" peripheral for 3d space games, think Elite Dangerous or No Mans Sky that both have one in their cockpits.
Whatever the outcome, when someone sets up an optical table, I'm sold.
ge96 8 hours ago [-]
feel like I saw this in a hackaday, at least remember hearing the podcast about projecting all the rays at all intersections, it was green though maybe I'm thinking of something else
oh wow yeah I've seen a lot of this channel's work before the lego display, the CV fiber optic bundle display
I'm sure I'm not the only one who thought "why not vacuum", so I went and found the creator's reasoning [0] for why it's not a priority:
> [I]nside the dome the air quickly ends up rotating at the same rate as the rest of the mechanism. It's reaching its design speed with the motor at less than half duty cycle. Even if it were practical to make the whole thing airtight, it doesn't solve a problem that I currently have. The sound it makes doesn't come from inside the dome but from the motor in the base.
[Self-reply with side-topic] Assuming a rectangular display rotating in standard air... what glass enclosure would be best?
My intuition says "change the sphere to a cylinder", because then we can minimize how much air could be passing around the sides and top of the display-rectangle, potentially curling around and causing turbulence and noise.
However, that introduces a new issue of visibility: Big flat surfaces have different glare/reflection problems than a spheroid does. It may become harder for the user to see clearly, whether from external glare or from internal reflections in a dark room. What if the top face of the glass cylinder was very slightly curved outwards, to avoid the worst-case scenario where you just can't look down into the device from certain angles? Depending on the refractive index of the glass, it could just be a thicker top, so that it doesn't create dead-space on the inside.
An earlier iteration of the same block is imo more impressive in its creativity - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wBrOV2FJM8&t=720 - such an unexpected and yet completely natural extension of the brick set.
4 hours ago [-]
tra3 8 hours ago [-]
Whoa, the intersection of different skills necessary is incredible.
- software
- math
- 3d printing
- electronics
Very impressive.
msuniverse2026 6 hours ago [-]
I wonder if you could have a vibrating chladni plate with sand on it and you match when the sand should jump with the light that's meant to be at that spot. You get the interruption of light looking like a mid-air pixel and then when it isn't needed it drops back down allowing light to pass through. Kind of like one of those mist-screens except there isn't mist where you don't need it.
btbuildem 6 hours ago [-]
Before I watched the video, my brain ran ahead and I imagined it would be one of those led "fans", except also rotating around it's base. It might be harder to sync the two rotations, but you'd have much less mass in motion that way.
The solid state ones are cool! The real mystery there is how the pixel volume was manufactured -- it doesn't seem like something easily DIY'd
raphman 5 hours ago [-]
There are companies that laser-'etch' 3D images into glass. I guess it's not that hard to find one that accepts a list of xyz coordinates.
dllu 9 hours ago [-]
I once considered making a spinning persistence of vision similar to this one specifically for visualizing lidar data from a spinning automotive lidar. The lidar has 128 beams and you could make a spinning array of 128 1D LED displays at exactly the same beam angles to recreate the point cloud from the lidar.
Anyway, I was too lazy to make it, but it's super neat to see that someone actually made something similar.
lifty 6 hours ago [-]
Would be great having one of these hooked up to an LLM agent so it can be somehow “embodied”. Like a Siri + volumetric display + speaker. Waiting for a company to build this.
kridsdale3 5 hours ago [-]
Like the Morpheus character near the end of Deus Ex.
wowczarek 3 hours ago [-]
Doom or Quake renderer coming when?
qoez 8 hours ago [-]
Never knew this was possible. I hope some huge company with lots of resources jumps on this and drives up the resolution and price.
andblac 4 hours ago [-]
Check out Voxon [1]. From the specs and youtube videos it seems like it's working on the same principle (rotating LED screen). Fun fact, it was co-founded by none other than Ken Silverman (the creator of Build engine) [2]. They've been pushing commercialization of this technology for years now.
Reminds me that there are limitations to volumetric displays—namely that, since you have no idea where the viewer is located, there is no backface culling you can perform. So it seems to work best for "cutaway" views.
I'd like to see one in person. Might be "magical" — the video only kind of hints at this.
This ones does not: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wrfBjRp61iY
Volumetric display in the video above uses static projector whose pixels light up etchings inside solid glass.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46137203
oh wow yeah I've seen a lot of this channel's work before the lego display, the CV fiber optic bundle display
> [I]nside the dome the air quickly ends up rotating at the same rate as the rest of the mechanism. It's reaching its design speed with the motor at less than half duty cycle. Even if it were practical to make the whole thing airtight, it doesn't solve a problem that I currently have. The sound it makes doesn't come from inside the dome but from the motor in the base.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pcAEqbYwixU&lc=UgygtRUb6XZyu...
My intuition says "change the sphere to a cylinder", because then we can minimize how much air could be passing around the sides and top of the display-rectangle, potentially curling around and causing turbulence and noise.
However, that introduces a new issue of visibility: Big flat surfaces have different glare/reflection problems than a spheroid does. It may become harder for the user to see clearly, whether from external glare or from internal reflections in a dark room. What if the top face of the glass cylinder was very slightly curved outwards, to avoid the worst-case scenario where you just can't look down into the device from certain angles? Depending on the refractive index of the glass, it could just be a thicker top, so that it doesn't create dead-space on the inside.
- software
- math
- 3d printing
- electronics
Very impressive.
The solid state ones are cool! The real mystery there is how the pixel volume was manufactured -- it doesn't seem like something easily DIY'd
Anyway, I was too lazy to make it, but it's super neat to see that someone actually made something similar.
[1] https://www.voxon.co/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_Silverman
Uh, I get the former but why the latter?
I mean, I think it's SUPER cool and would not mind one sitting on my desk.
But from a product standpoint...? It doesn't scale well in size, resolution or refresh rate.
VR is pretty much better if you want a the kind of immersion I think you'd be looking for, and even selling that is hard.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nM7wsXcYQFM
which I guess is the "volume" part
[1]: https://youtu.be/pcAEqbYwixU?t=1038