record – LABS

Thesis Info

Keywords: cinema, holographic, interactive, structured light, digital imaging, 3d, stereoscopic, holography, hologram, kinect, phantasmagoria

Abstract: 200-500 words: In mainstream media and entertainment, holography is often misrepresented as single perspective non-stereoscopic imagery suggesting three-dimensionality. Traditional holographic artists, however, utilize a laser setup to record and reconstruct wavefronts to describe a scene auto-stereoscopically, that is, in multi-perspective natural parallax vision. Although these approaches are mutually exclusive in practice, they share a similar goal of staging three-dimensional (3D) imagery for a window-like viewing experience. A satisfactory form did not previously exist for artists who wish to explore holography as cinema without high-cost equipment, time-consuming approaches, or impractical limitations. This work presents a conceptual solution to record, reconstruct, and experience holographic visualizations in a cinematic context using a non-waveform digital computer approach. By recording 3D information from a scene using the structured light method, a custom computer program performs stereoscopic rendering in real-time during presentation. Using a hardware device, such as the Microsoft Kinect, artists and scientists can explore the holographic cinematic form interactively. As a result, live scenes are recorded as 3D data with unlimited reconstruction possibilities.