Top TechTop Tech #4: Holograms and teleportation
…Highlighting interesting or important innovations with long-term promise:
Today’s News:
Beam me up — Quantum teleportation achieved
Leia’s only hope: Holograms
Lenses as thin as paper
Beam me up — Quantum teleportation achieved
The quantum phenomenon of entanglement — in which two particles, separatedby any amount of distance, can instantaneously affect one another — hasbeen used to “teleport” data. (Not matter, let alone humans, Scotty).
CNet reports physicists in the Netherlands sent quantum dataconcerning the spin state of an electron to another electron about 10 feet away— “seemingly faster than the speed of light.”
The researchers say “quantum teleportation has been recordedin the past, but the results in this study have an unprecedented replicationrate of 100 percent at the current distance.”
Theresearchers made their own lounge-in-cheek video here.
Leia’s only hope: Holograms
A startup claims its multiview backlight system will display full-color holographic images and video from a mobile phone.
Leia Inc was founded in December 2013, building on core technology developed at HP Labs. The tech “relies on new physics enabled only by the latest nano-fabrication methods,” the company says. “We developed a mass-production process that makes it hardly different to fabricate from a standard mobile LCD display. We also ensured that holographic content creation would be a breeze, with a webGL-based API that lets web developers easily create interactive holographic content in the browser or re-use existing 3D graphics to turn them into mind blowing holograms.”
Technology Review reports a two-by-two-inch “holomodule” will be Leia’s first product, and will be capable of producing full-color 3-D images and videos that are visible—with no special glasses—from 64 different viewpoints.
Lenses as thin as paper
Paper-thin lenses could shrink cameras and holographic displays, Technology Review reports.
The “nanostructured sheets of silicon can bend light in unusual ways, eliminating the need for bulky lenses.” The result could be holographic displays that “offer new ways to interact with computers and new opportunities for the entertainment industry.” Also, professional-quality camera lenses could be no more thick than a credit card.
The technology is being developed by a Harvard applied physics professor “challenged” by Google to make RGB nanostructured films that it could use in its Glass headsets.
