[jameswilsterman]

I was recently at the Exploratorium in SF (Embarcadero). They have a mirror there that tricks your brain into thinking you are seeing an upside-down reflection of yourself hanging in the air about 5ft in front of where the mirror actually is. I actually tried to touch the 'reflection' and my hand just met the air. My first thought was why don't we use these to create 3D images. Would your domed mirror proposal work similarly?

http://www.exploratorium.edu/visit/central-gallery/giant-mir...

[TheZenPsycho]

well yep, but that one has the advantage of using the lightfield already reflecting off of you and simply redirecting it back with relatively simple, shall I say, macro-optics.

The kind of system I'm talking about needs a 2D image with enough "pixels" to fill a volume convincingly instead of just a 2D plane, and the optics would need to be far more complicated, precise, and created at a very small scale which would appear as a textured surface like a fresnel lense or one of those 3D lenticular stickers you sometimes see. Then once you've figured that out, you need to get the projection and the optics to line up precisely- unless you can figure out a way to build in some tolerance to the alignment of the projection.

Aside from that, the goal is essentially the same. To produce a field of light coming out of some "window" with the same directional qualities as the light coming out of a real window.

[Geee]

One solution for holographic lightfields is to use nanoantenna arrays. Multiple antennas in an array, in which each antennas phase and amplitude is modulated is able to produce these directional lightfields by interference, and by modulation it's possible to change the shape of the radiation pattern without touching the antennas. In nanoscale, it could create waves in optical wavelengths.