Holographic display table is everything 3D should be

We don't have 3D like Avatar yet, but we're getting close.

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Back in December, we saw some of Zebra Imaging's impressive full-color holographic prints. With funding from DARPA, Zebra has been able to develop and electronic version of the same technology, embodied in an actual glasses-free 3D holographic projector table.

DARPA started funding their "Urban Photonic Sandtable Display" back in 2005, and it's taken until now for the program to produce the utterly fantastical platform that it was shooting for, namely:

Color, real-time, 3D holographic displays with up to 12 inches of visual depth. The technology enables 360-degree viewing by a team of 20 people without 3D glasses or goggles.

As we've seen, this isn't simply a 3D image. It's a full color 360 degree high definitionhologram, meaning that you can walk all the way around the display and view it from any angle you want. And not just view it, but actually see the scene from that perspective. Plus, the implication of phrases like "real-time" and "interactive" implies that the display is capable of dynamically refreshing itself to some extent (although it doesn't sound like it's yet capable of full-motion).

These displays will at first be put to work for the military, but Zebra Imaging also wants to get them into the 3D entertainment and gaming markets, where viewers can "escape into lifelike, three-dimensional entertainment and games that explode with full-color, true-3D realism." Sounds good to me, now how much am I gonna have to pay to get one of these in my living room?

Check out a little reminder of how incredible Zebra's holograms are in the vid below.

Invisible solar panel screen charges your phone all the time

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A transparent photovoltaic film that lives on top of traditional displays could provide substantial amounts of power to mobile devices. By substantial, we mean that as long as you spend enough time outside, you might never have to charge your phone ever again.

A French company called Wysips has somehow managed to create a 100-micron thin film that, while essentially invisible, can produce enough power from sunlight to fully charge a cellphone in about six hours. This translates into about 30 minutes of talk time per hour of sunlight, which is three times better than those bulky cases with traditional solar panels on the back.

Cellphones are the most obvious application for this technology, there's really nothing preventing every single gadget with a battery and a screen from taking advantage from a trickle of extra power, and you can start looking for consumer devices with this technology integrated into their screens within the next 12 months. For high drain devices the battery boost will certainly be less noticeable, but there's nothing wrong with an extra five or 10 minutes or whatever of plug-freedom.

A bottle of wastewater could be powering your house by next year

Water plus sunlight equals hydrogen plus oxygen equals electricity, in this efficient artificial plant.

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By mimicking the essential process that allows plants to produce energy, an MIT researcher has managed to create electricity out of water more efficiently than conventional solar cells, to the point where one and a half bottles of wastewater could power an entire house for a day.

Plants, being extremely clever, somehow manage to use sunlight to crack water into oxygen and hydrogen. They combine the hydrogen with carbon dioxide to make sugar (which is what I would do, 'cause sugar is good stuff), but we humans have been trying to figure out for about a century how to skip the sugar step and just recombine that oxygen and hydrogen back into water to generate electricity.

Daniel Nocera, a chemistry and engineering researcher at MIT, has come up with an artificial "leaf" that uses cobalt and phosphate to split water molecules using nothing but sunlight. When the oxygen and hydrogen are recombined, they make electricity at an efficiency higher than that of traditional solar cells, and it's easy to just store the gases to be recombined later in a fuel cell when the sun doesn't happen to be shining.

Nocera has just teamed up with Tata Group to work towards commercializing this technology. By sometime next year, the goal is to have a cheap power plant about the size of a refrigerator that could generate enough power with some sun and a bottle and a half of water (wastewater, even) to power a small home for a day. And it only scales up from there, apparently:

"Nocera estimates that the world consumes 14 terawatts (TW) of power today. By 2050, it will need 16TW. If his solution works, said Nocera, it would need a swimming pool full of water every day to meet the world's electricity needs."

While I'd really like to believe that, I'm not entirely sure how you get from one and a half bottles of water per house to a swimming pool for the entire planet short of using antimatter. Hmm, maybethat's the secret that plants have been hiding for a billion years.

Live Mint, via Fast Company

First glasses-free 3D smartphone arrives on AT&T

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Here we go. It's smartphone season and everybody's going for dual-core this and four-inch screen that. This puppy right here is taking a page from Nintendo's 3DS — the LG Thrill 4G will be the first U.S. smartphone to boast a glasses-free 3D screen.

It's been a big wave this week for AT&T, but luckily for fans of LG and Android the Thrill 4G will be landing. The Thrill 4G's main attraction is obviously its glasses-free 3D 4.3-inch screen and dual 5-megapixel cameras capable of shooting 3D photos and high definition 720p video. If 3D is not your cup of tea, 2D recording will top out at full HD 1080p resolution.

Under the hood you'll find a dual-core 1GHz processor, 8GB of internal storage and an included 16GB microSD card. As its name implies, the Thrill 4G will also be a 4G smartphone with which you can expect blazing download and upload speeds.

Pricing and availability have yet to be announced, with AT&T only hinting at a release in the coming months, but overall the Thrill 4G sounds like a slick and powerful smartphone. What do you think? Does glasses-free 3D have a better chance at surviving than regular 3D that require glasses?

Update: Check out our hands-on with the Thrill for more, as well as our coverage of the Thrill's main contender, Sprint and HTC's EVO 3D

AT&T, via Hothardware

Greatest March Madness plays lovingly recreated in Lego

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Are you suffering from March Madness fever? Well if you do get bored and want to relive some of the tournament's classic moments, check out this video showing four of the greatest moments in NCAA tournament history, only Lego-ized.

The detail in each clip is impressive, getting not only the moves down pat, but even the uniforms and jersey numbers.

Clip 1 shows Christian Laettner's overtime buzzer beating turnaround from the 1992 Kentucky vs Duke game, perhaps the greatest moment in March Madness history.

Clip 2 is Chris Webber's phantom time out call from the 1993 North Carolina vs Michigan national championship game. Note the fan in the stands with the "this won't count anyway" sign. A reference to Michigan's subsequent disqualification following the player payments scandal.

Clip 3 is Tyus Edney's coast to coast game winning drive from the 1995 UCLA vs Missouri game.

And finally clip 4 is Zoubek's intentionally missed free throw followed by Hayward's half-court near miss from last year's championship between Duke and Butler.

Hopefully there will be more classic moments like these during this year's tournament.

YouTube, via Deadspin.com

X-51A hypersonic Waverider to try for Mach 6 on Tuesday

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Last May, the X-51A Waverider fired up a scramjet engine and boosted itself to a hypersonic Mach 5. The Air Force was hoping for Mach 6, and, next week, the military will unleash this beast for another flight.

The X-51A Waverider uses a scramjet engine, which uses no moving parts at all but can (hypothetically, at least) achieve speeds anywhere from Mach 12 to Mach 24. Mach 24 is, if you're counting, just north of 18,000 miles per hour, which would get me from my house in SF to the DVICE office in NYC in under 10 minutes, which is only about 8 minutes longer than my normal daily commute from bed to couch.

During the last test, the Waverider managed to achieve Mach 5, but it took longer to get there than engineers had hoped, and the test flight was terminated a minute and a half early. And by "terminated," they mean crashed into the ocean. Data from that flight revealed that the vehicle gets so hot from friction with the air that the engine actually grows in size by nearly an inch, and this (plus other factors) may have caused a seal to fail. The remaining test vehicles have been beefed up to keep this from happening again.

On March 22, an X-51A will be carried up to 50,000 feet slung underneath the wing of a B-52. It will be dropped, and a booster rocket will fire up to get the Waverider up to Mach 4.5, which is when the scramjet kicks in. The booster rocket is jettisoned, and then the X-51A goes hypersonic and we'll see what the vehicle can really do.

Below, you can watch an Air Force video about the previous test, giving more details and footage of the X-51A. And we've also got a gallery full of extra pics of this futuristic vehicle that somehow also exists in the present.

Boeing, via U.S. Air Force

Methane Rainstorms on Titan

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Saturn's moon Titan has a thick atmosphere of methane, which means it may have a geography very similar to ours. You know, plus methane and at extremely cold temperatures. But we're just now seeing the first images of the moon experiencing a mighty methane rainstorm.

What you're looking at appears to be a gigantic rainstorm and resulting flood near the equator. Those dark blotches are flooded areas, and the white wisps are methane clouds that have just dumped onto the surface.

Pretty cool! Although I still don't think I want to visit

Take a peek at the Droid 3

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So, you just bought a Droid 2 and signed a 2-year contract, did you? I bet you really don't want to see the phone that will imminently make your new phone feel old, do you? Well, sorry.

Yes, this here is the next version of Motorola's Droid. It's got a slide-out keyboard much like its predecessors and doesn't look to be packing anything all too surprising, at least on the outside. On the inside, expect the latest version of Android and a modest spec bump from the Droid 2.

See, that wasn't so bad, was it?

Howard Forums via BGR

Nintendo 3DS to stream 3D movie trailers, have access to AT&T hotspots

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If you pick up one of Nintendo's new 3D handhelds, the 3DS, you'll have more than a 3D gaming machine that doesn't require glasses; you'll also have something you can use to stream 3D movie trailers in a Starbucks. The future!

Nintendo is bringing an "eStore" to the 3DS, a place to stream 3D movie and game trailers and check out game screenshots. And hey, that'll be one place to see 3D trailers without having to go see a 3D movie, so that's cool.

As for the hotspots, Nintendo is teaming up with AT&T to allow 3DS users to connect to over 10,000 of AT&T's Wi-Fi hotspots, which are all over the place in locations such as Starbucks. So that's something!

Joystiq and Kotaku