A race car model no larger than a grain of sand, created using the new high-speed two-photon lithography process

The printer uses an existing process called "two-photon lithography," and utilizes a special type of liquid resin. That resin contains molecules which cause the liquid around them to harden into a polymer, once they’re exposed to laser light. In order to be activated, however, they must absorb two photons of that light at once. The only place where the beam is intense enough for that to happen is right at its center. This allows for great precision in the printing process, as only the very middle of the beam is the "active" part.

Additionally, unlike traditional 3D printing, two-photon lithography allows for solid material to be created anywhere within the depth of the liquid resin – it isn’t limited to simply adding to a surface layer of hardened material.

Along with the resin, another one of the keys to the Vienna printer’s peppy performance is a high-speed motorized mirror system, that directs the beam of the laser within that resin. Because the mirrors are constantly in motion throughout the printing process, their acceleration and deceleration times have been minimized as much as possible, in order that more of their time can be spent on the actual creation of the object.

"The printing speed [of two-photon lithography] used to be measured in millimeters per second," said Prof. Jürgen Stampfl. "Our device can do five meters in one second."

As can be seen in the video below, the printer is currently pretty darn good at building things such as tiny race car models – it can make one that’s a mere 285 micrometers long in just four minutes. A bio-compatible resin is currently in the works, however, which could hopefully be used to build micro-scaffolding for a patient’s living cells to grow into, in the creation of biological tissues.

Take, for example, Tokyo-based Burton’s Aerial 3D technology. The company claims it’s the first 3-D tech that casts three-dimensional objects in mid-air without using any kind of screen. It recalls that scene in Star Wars where the crustacean-faced guy is planning the rebel battleplan around his big holographic table. And it’s here today.

Rather than using a screen to generate the illusion of three dimensions, Aerial 3D is a laser system that uses beams of light projected from below to generate plasma excitation in atoms of oxygen and nitrogen in the air. It currently can create 50,000 points of light per second, giving it a somewhat choppy frame rate of 10-15 fps. Burton is working to improve that to 24-30 fps, comparable to that of basic video.

The result of all of this is a floating, 3-D image that can be viewed naturally in 360 degrees. It’s not quite the Death Star wrecking tech of our sci-fi visions just yet, but if the video below is any indication it’s well on its way.

A new, truly 360-degree 3-D display has been developed by researchers at Osaka University. The fog display is created by three projectors each beaming a different image into a column of thin fog, making the resulting image appear 3-dimensional from all angles. This technique means that viewers can physically walk around the display to see it from different vantage points without losing the 3-D effect.

As we see in the video, the image quality is still a little shaky, but researchers say their next step is to make the technology “more stable.” Applications for the 360-Degree Observable Fog Display are not exactly clear, but researcher Asuka Yagi says in the video that they hope to apply it in “healthcare and entertainment.” The project was inspired by amusement park fog displays, so we can only hope that means one day your children will be taking pictures with 3-D fog princesses at theme parks.

Carl Zeiss has been making their Cinemizer video glasses for a few years, but now they added 3D capability for home theater and gaming applications.

The Cinemizer Plus video glasses have a tiny 16:9 format OLED screen in each eyepiece, with a native resolution of 640 x 480 pixels. The resulting field of view is the same as watching a 45-inch screen from a distance of about 6.5 feet, so it should be a pretty cinematic experience. A small external box connects to a variety of playback sources including recent iPods and iPhones, along with many other phones and video players, various game consoles, laptops, and Blu-ray players.

One nice touch is that eyeglass wearers have a separate diopter adjustment for each eyepiece, so you won’t be trying to wear them on top of your regular glasses as with some of those shutter glasses for 3D TV sets.

Battery life is about 4 hours which covers most movies, and the battery is charged through its USB connection. Still, this sounds like the perfect entertainment companion for any longish airline trip.

Sharp has revealed a glasses-free 3.4in stereoscopic LCD touchscreen display for use in digital cameras, smartphones and other handheld devices. The company claims that the new screen offers the highest brightness in the industry, reduced crosstalk and can easily be switched between 2D and 3D mode.

Perhaps further fueling speculation that Nintendo’s 3DS gaming device will feature a display developed by Sharp, the Corporation recently revealed a 3.4in 854 x 480 resolution parallax barrier 3D touchscreen LCD at a press conference in Tokyo. A series of vertical slits incorporated in the display controls the direction of light from the screen so that different images can be directed to the left and right eyes, giving the user the illusion of depth without the need for 3D glasses.

Fujifilm is applying similar glasses-free technology to its Finepix Real 3D camera and standalone 3D LCD Monitor.

Advances in CG-Silicon technology (developed jointly by the Sharp Corporation and Semiconductor Energy Laboratory Co Ltd) have resulted in a reduction in the width of the wiring inside an LCD panel, making the module about the same thickness as conventional 2D displays and increasing the brightness up to 500 cd/m². According to Sharp, this, combined with parallax barrier optimization and a contrast ratio of 1000:1, has led to lower crosstalk and the industry’s highest brightness to be achieved.

As well as facilitating the display of both landscape and portrait 3D images without the need for special glasses, Sharp says that its new technology is also able to switch between 2D and 3D mode. The company will shortly be starting mass production of a non-touchscreen version of the display.

pCubee The not-so-poor man’s alternative to 3D University of British Columbia

People who hate wearing 3-D glasses may like a new approach from a company called pCubee. A handheld cube-shaped device uses small LCD panels on all sides to create the illusion of playing with 3-D objects within a virtual cube, such as tiny cows or a pinball-style game, Technabob reports. You know you always wanted to toss tiny cows around inside a cube.

The idea draws on a 3-D display approach known as fishtank virtual reality, where a real-time physics simulation engine coupled with the user’s head perspective creates the constant sense of interacting with a 3-D world contained inside the device.

Users wear a pair of headphones that tracks their head movement, and can hold pCubee in one hand as they do more fine-tuned control with a regular computer mouse held in the other. A stylus also allows users to poke or prod objects bouncing around inside pCubee.

Researchers at the University of British Columbia envision their viewing tank as having a future in games, storytelling, and education, as well as in viewing 3-D maps of the human heart or architectural mockups.

24-Hour Service Astronauts John Grunsfeld (left) and Andrew Feustel perform repairs on the Hubble telescope during one of many periods of darkness in the final seven-hour space walk.

We do a lot of Hubble gawking here. Arguably NASA’s most enduring mission, the telescope has provided humans with the deepest possible look into the corners of the universe and papered many a desktop background. It’s beamed back so much beauty that it’s easy to take it for granted.

But Hubble 3D reminds us how miraculous a thing the Hubble telescope truly is. It is the apotheosis, the pinnacle of Hubblegasms. It’s IMAX 3D in space.

We’ve already talked to the filmmakers and seen an advance cut, so by now you know the story: space shuttle Atlantis astronauts hauled up a giant 3D IMAX camera to document their daring and dangerous Hubble repair mission in the spring of 2009. They had only 8 minutes of film (every pound hauled into space is precious), but none was wasted. Just like every astronaut has trouble articulating the consciousness-rattling power of seeing Earth from space, difficult too is describing the footage these astronauts captured. It’s beautiful and thrilling, and worth the price of admission alone.

In addition, the Hubble 3D team has taken archival footage and some traditional 2D shots and digitally converted them to three dimensions. This footage looks incredible, with a camera mounted on the shell of a solid rocket booster during launch providing an unbelievably guttural thrill. Before the film even gets to space, the shuttle launch sequence had me giggling with pleasure. (Actually, my first awed giggle was seeing the NASA logo, in animated 3D, right in front of my face during the opening credits. But that’s just because I’m a nerd).

And as the coup de grace, Hubble’s mountain of data is used to create spectacular 3D simulated fly-throughs of the universe. Similar to the 3D renderings of the Ultra Deep Field image we’ve seen previously, the two sequences take us first through the Orion Nebula and then from our Milky Way to the edge of space.

The Hubble Ultra Deep Field

It’s sequences like these that articulate just how difficult it is for our minds to even begin to comprehend the scale of the universe. It sounds like a cliche, but it’s true: when faced with something like this film’s final edge-of-space tour, the mind in some ways simply shuts down–trying to grasp the sheer inconsequentiality of our little grain of sand on the world’s largest beach is such a shock that the brain simply can’t continue; it can only sit slack-jawed.

It’s good for humans to be presented with the sheer scale of these thoughts. We’d all be saner if we could see, as we do in the film’s final sequence, our vast galaxy reduced to a speck in the background from billions of light years away, and that we are but even smaller specks inside.

This is Hubble’s lasting contribution. And to this contribution, Hubble 3D pays a fittingly supersized tribute. Go see it.

Watch 2-D Home Movies of Yourself Watching 3-D TV…In 3-D!

More than a year after the first consumer 3-D-ready HDTVs were demoed at CES, the next generation of sets are going on sale this week. But, aside from the new TVs, glasses, and Blu-ray players, the question of content remains. While there are already brand partnerships with networks like Discovery and ESPN, that’s just the tip of the iceberg. As an alternative, the two companies with 3-D TVs but without major brand-name cable partners (Samsung and Toshiba) showed off sets that could convert 2-D video to 3-D in real time.

The converter chip on Toshiba’s Cell TV is part of their own platform co-created with Sony and IBM (yes, it’s the same brain inside the PS3). Other HDTV makers, though, can go to a third party to upgrade their sets to upconvert 2-D content to 3-D.

One such third party is chipmaker Quartics, who provides the graphics processing brains behind everything from netbooks to HDTVs and set-top boxes. And this year at CES they demoed their own 2-D to 3-D upconversion chip technology.

Quartics CTO Mohammed Usman gave us a look at the guts behind converting 2-D video to 3-D. In essence, a series of algorithms on Quartics’ chip is watching the video along with you, and analyzing it on the fly. With virtually no delay, it can distinguish foreground from background and identify the subject of the shot as the object that needs added depth. The process is very similar to face recognition algorithms used by digital cameras and camcorders to autofocus on faces, and sometimes know whether or not they’re smiling.

To upgrade 2-D to 3-D, the software thinks of the colors it sees at the bottom of the screen as what’s closest to your eye, and what’s at the top as the farthest. This is how it establishes what the background of the scene looks like.

But what about the subject? The chip tracks the pixel color and light intensity of groups of pixels together; when it senses a sudden shift in light or color, it knows it’s encountered a new object. The chip also knows that moving clusters of color or light are likely to be the subject of the shot. Once it’s identified the objects, it finds a central point from which to draw lines of perspective–the same way we learned vanishing points and two-point perspective in elementary school art classes.

With on-the-fly conversions, however, you won’t see many effects that jump off the screen. Currently the algorithms are not fine-tuned enough to re-create the immersive depth needed without being distracting or gimmicky like old-school movie-theater 3-D.

Once the chip knows what objects on the screen to assign depth to, it can start the process of converting the image. The chip creates two separate images, one for each eye, which is flips back and forth at high frequency to trick your eyes into thinking you’re seeing both angles at once.

When paired with a set of 3-D glasses that isolate the left and right images from each other at the same frequency, the effect is impressive, but not as realistic as video shot with a two-lensed stereoscopic 3-D camera (or animated originally in 3-D).

At CES Quartics demoed nature videos and the trailer for Appoloosa, but Usman is confident their technique will work with just about any genre. Film with a lot of movement, though, is trickier and may require more sophisticated algorithms–or maybe you’ll have to wait for native 3-D footage before the Super Bowl in 3-D will be livable.

Samsung’s in-booth demo, for one, showed an upscaled football game. And, while the holographic effect did come across, a wide receiver dashing across the screen had a bit of a ghost trailing behind him–as predicted. Still, upconverting existing content to 3-D is better than waiting around for the first wave of Blu-ray discs or cable broadcasts. And, since the chips are no more costly than those on other 3-D sets, it’s the perfect stop-gap.

The Vuzix Wrap 920 glasses are compatible with many video devices to deliver a virtual cinema experience

Can’t afford a big screen TV or projector but still want to experience that cinema feeling when watching a movie? The Vuzix Wrap 920 video eyewear is a sunglass-style display that delivers a virtual 67-inch screen as seen from 10ft away, displays 2D and 3D video and is claimed to be the most advanced wearable display available. It also features removable noise-isolating earbuds, an adjustable nose bridge and weighs less than 3oz.

The Vuzix Wrap 920 connects to all NTSC or PAL audio/video devices with video-out capabilities and composite video connections. The eyewear comes with a composite A/V adapter for iPod/iPhone for simple plug ‘n’ play connection to your portable media player. There are optional Wrap Adapter connections for HDMI-equipped devices and even desktop PC and laptops for watching movies.

We can think of a few scenarios where these glasses would be quite handy – like in bed when your partner is trying to sleep but you want to watch a movie, or when you can’t focus on the tiny airplane screen with matching poor quality sound.

Vuzix says that with support for standard 2D movies as well as virtually all common 3D video formats, you’ll be able to watch all the latest movie releases, as they were meant to be seen.

The Vuzix Wrap 920 glasses deliver the equivalent image of a 67-inch screen as viewed from 10ft via twin high-resolution 640 x 480 LCD displays, 60Hz progressive scan update rate with ultra-low video distortion and 24-bit true color (16 million colors).

The unit is compatible with iPods, iPhones, portable DVD players, cell phones with video out, all composite video devices, digital cameras and camcorders, PCs and laptops with a VGA port. It also works with video sources equipped with HDMI connectors, such as set-top boxes, video game consoles and Blu-ray players.

The glasses onscreen display can be adjusted for brightness, contrast, hue and color saturation and they also feature removable noise-isolating earbuds, an adjustable nose bridge and are wearable over prescription glasses.

Two AA alkaline batteries will power the device for up to six hours according to Vuzix.

Accessories include a Wrap Lightshield: that blocks distracting outside light, and changeable lens that allow you to pop out the standard dark grey lens for alternates to match your mood or style.

The Vuzix range is also set to expand with the Wrap 920AR augmented reality glasses we tried at this year’s CES. This platform incorporates a Stereo Camera that mounts to the front of Wrap eyewear and captures real-life images that can be combined with mixed reality software to overlay computer-generated graphics.

There’s also the Wrap 6DoF Tracker/Compass that, when connected to a supporting device, transforms your Wrap eyewear into a virtual reality system that senses 6° of head movement and compass direction.

The basis of most 3D systems is to "trick" our eyes into believing that an image shown on a flat screen has three dimensions, but what if you could throw away the screen entirely! It sounds simply too far-fetched and impossible to choreograph, but that’s exactly what researchers MIT’s SENSEable City Lab and Aerospace Robotics and Embedded Systems Laboratory (ARES Lab) have created with Flyfire – a cloud of LED-carrying micro-helicopters controlled in synchrony to show unique animated light displays in three-dimensional space.

Each "micro-helicopter" carries a small LED and is digitally-controlled and choreographed as a smart pixel that emits colored light. This is achieved using self-stabilizing and precise controlling technology developed by the ARES lab which allows the pixels to be controlled in real time. It has also been made possible by recent advances in battery technology and wireless control. The pixel is capable of displaying digital information such as 3D writing and pictures and rearranging itself several times in a performance before needing to recharge.

The Flyfire canvas can reorganize itself from one shape to another or bring a two-dimensional photographic image into a 3D form. "It’s like when Winnie the Pooh hits a beehive: a swarm of bees comes out and chases him while changing its configuration to resemble a beast," said E Roon Kang, research fellow at SENSEable City Lab. "Unlike traditional displays that can only be seen from the front, Flyfire becomes a three dimensional immersive display that can be experienced from all directions," said team member Carnaven Chiu.

Flyfire was developed as a public space installation, and although currently SENSEable are capable of controlling a limited numbers of helicopters they are aiming to further develop the technology to control very large numbers for more ambitious displays and applications. They also suggest it could be a step towards ‘smart dust’ technology, a wireless network of tiny synchronized devices the size of dust.