Holographic movies: Exit Surface, Enter Space

by Vasilio Freiman, March 4, 2012

Since we stepped into the second decade of the third millenium the excitement about the future of technology has grown along with the expetations cherished by various groups to push their liberties to new boundaries or to take down any boundaries. This has been the main trend in the western civilization triggered by the Enlightment philosophy and dragged around by hippies. The word freedom has been elevated to the point that life without freedom is now considered empty or at least of junk-food quality.

It seems like the pursuit of freedom could not help affecting some of the most profitable industries – computer technologies  and movies – leading to a steady rise in video-games production and an outburst of “three-dee” movies that have flooded the market in the last years. Like offer – like demand, which means people want something that they hope will satisfy them, where ‘something’ equals freedom to do whatever you want with economy and without much aftermath, so video games and 3D movies have turned out to be the pocket that freedom-seekers can reach their hands into and grab it. In this instance James Cameron’s ambitious $230-million venture about blue goblins taking a stand for their rights was not an accident. Avatar was planned to become a turning point in the film industry and to mark a complete takeover of 3D movies. Eric Hedegard of Rolling Stone wrote in January of 2010 that “the burden of reviving Hollywood [had rested] on the shoulders of James Cameron” and it looks like it was rather heavy. In fact, they did make a turn but they tried too hard, so it turned out to be a 360 turn. The 21^st century requires something greater than that, and I’m not talking about 3D – there is nothing wrong with it, – but what is wrong is that there is still no real 3D. Why? Because it is the same old flat screen with a people eating staring in the same direction, with the only difference that these people are now wearing glasses that create a certain illusion of space tentatively called 3D. The trick is that it is just an illusion created by manipulating our visual perception. The eyes are sending impulses to the brain making us perceive flat non-material images on the wall as real (pardon my French). Although it does give us some dose of amusement the awareness that it is only a picture ruins the whole fun.

We need something greater than the good old flat screen to which the industrial generation of ours became so addicted when people first saw a train heading towards them from inside a wall and screamed in excitement like junior-high kids. From then on the eye structure of humans had begun to transform becoming dominant over other senses. The amazing era of cinema was preceded not only by photography but also, on a more simple level, by the art of watching. There were people in Europe who were learning to watch things even before first films appeared. Those people were dubbed flaneurs. They would walk on the streets of Paris doing basically nothing but looking for something interesting to see. Once they would find it, which could be a fire, a street accident or arrest, they would take a spot aside the scene, usually at a distance far enough to be able to see the big picture and would watch the event leaning against a wall, arms folded, while other people merely would crowd around the scene as close as they could.

The occupation of millions of people known today as movie-watching is what is inherited considerably from flaneurs, therefore the invention of the motion picture at that time was a response to the desire of many people to observe things from the side without physical participation. Probably cinema would not have become so popular weren’t there been demand for watching others cry, die, suffer or become rich.

It appears more clearly that today we are on the verge of big changes in technology. It means that if film industry is willing to survive in the long run it should be willing to keep up with technological development. In fact, I believe Hollywood can make a leap forward instead of taking tiny steps if they begin to think about never-seen-before techninques of art expression. What I state here is that the technology of light projections onto a flat screen has steadily been moving toward its obsoleteness. The contemporary 3D and 4D formats are only variations within the same theme. What we need is to apply a genuinely ground-breaking technology, that is, real 3D projections that would be independent of a surface to be projected onto, but will require only cubic space. The picture will simply “hang” in the air. All the previous forms of picture art needed a surface – a canvas, a photo-paper or a wall, which offered only one angle of watching, the one that an artist, a photographer or a director of photography chose. Some companies like Walt Disney have already experimented with available technologies and built a different type of a movie theater in which instead of one screen there were several flat screens put together and set around the audience in a semi-circle creating a 180 panoramic view. To shoot a film of such panoramic format a company called CicleVision located in Canada had built special cameras used for shooting such films as America the Beautiful that had managed to divert critics’ attention from its sophisticated technology to its ethnic inequality issues. However, the same flat surface was still there, but now it was around you.

Well, the idea is of course not new, especially if we remember Star Wars where we see the characters in the film getting in touch with each other running a holographic video of someone on the other end of the line. While George Lucas had showed this feature in the film referring to a far-away future when such device should be available for mass use, in fact it is not quite that far ahead. For example, some years ago I got my picture taken using laser scanning and placed inside a glass cube, so you can look at it at all angles. Since the 90s scientists have been developing 3D scanners that can copy and recreate material objects in the matters of minutes using liquid plastic and metal. Then I thought that if a steady 3D picture was so easy to make, the same thing could be done in motion and placed inside a sphere or a cylinder and seats could be set around it to watch it.

This new technology that is going to take over in the nearest two or three decades is called holographic imaging. The audience will be actually moving around the picture having a desirable angle to watch the film at instead of enjoying the only one offered by a cameraman. It seems like holographic movies are the next generation of entertainment that will inevitably make flat screens obsolete. The size of a screen will no longer be measured in squares but in cubes. But God knows what’s in store for us years from now, maybe tactile material objects that are pre-produced and recorded as in a video. That will not be surprising either because such has been the trend in the last years in regard to people’s aspiration to experience things by physical contact rather then by observation. To better undestand what I mean, go to a museum and watch people reach out their hands to the artifacts, or come up to a stuffed figure of an animal you have never seen before. Someday the demand will receive its supply. The sky is the limit.
Musion Hologram Technology