to hide ‘secret’ ingredients behind this disappearing ink to be revealed only by the ‘touch’ of a reader’s hand.
Moving away from print, two groups
of students didn’t even bother to pause on tablets or smartphones, but rocketed forward to holograms and video-enabled contact lenses.
Looking for what they called “the complete magazine experience,” one group decided that the current methods of enhancing print magazines were too limited.
“For example, a regular magazine (print
or digital) about cars could have pictures in it, but imagine getting the car you are reading about projected in front of you that you can walk around, make smaller or bigger, and view from different angles.
This idea sounds like pure sci-fi fantasy,
right? Not according to the students. Most holographic systems require a surface to project content onto, but a system called Aerial 3D produces 3D projections in mid-air without needing a surface.
The system works by focusing laser
light to produce plasma excitation from the nitrogen and oxygen in the
Aerial 3D could produce 3D projections in mid-air without needing a surface.
air. While the technology isn’t quite ready yet, it is getting closer every year.
First developed in 2006, the technology
has improved 50-fold in five years, which, according to the students, would put it on pace to produce 7.5 million dots per second in 15 years. That level of resolution would be sufficient for making holographs out of complex objects, texts, images, and movies.
How would this work? The readers
would wear a device that would consist of three parts: 1) a camera to detect which page of the print magazine the reader is on via image recognition; 2) a depth sensor like the one used in Microsoft’s Kinect system to recognise and analyse gestures by the reader to control and interact with the hologram, and 3) an aerial 3D projector for the hologram.
A second group of students wanted to
make the magazine-reading experience more visual and more immersive. Their vision did not involve images floating