Powerful lasers, futuristic digital cameras, 3-D television and more

Highlights of Frontiers in Optics Meeting in San Jose, Oct. 11-15

WASHINGTON, Oct. 1—The latest technology in optics and lasers will be on display at the Optical Society's (OSA) Annual Meeting, Frontiers in Optics (FiO), which takes place Oct. 11-15 at the Fairmont San Jose Hotel and the Sainte Claire Hotel in San Jose, Calif.

Information on free registration for reporters is contained at the end of this release. Research highlights of the meeting include:

• A Special Symposium: The Future of 3-D Television
• Laser Fusion and Exawatt Lasers
• 1,001 Cameras See in Gigapixels
• All That Glitters is Now Gold
• Prehistoric Bear Diet Revealed by Laser Archaeology
• Illumination-Aware Imaging

SPECIAL SYMPOSIUM: THE FUTURE OF 3-D TELEVISION

With 3-D movies helping to drive record box office revenues this spring and companies like Sony and Panasonic rolling out the first 3-D-enabled televisions, a timely special symposium titled "The Future of 3-D Display: The Marketplace and the Technology" will feature presentations on current and future technologies driving the 3-D revolution. Some highlights:

• Rod Archer, vice president of Cinema Products at RealD Inc., will offer in his keynote speech an overview of 3-D movie systems already in use in some 1,700 screens around the world. Archer will discuss the current state-of-the-art, the challenges and the opportunities of 3-D cinema technologies.
• Martin Banks of the University of California, Berkeley will discuss the difficulties of creating 3-D images free of perceptual distortions that don't cause headaches, as well as his own solution, a temporally multiplexed volumetric display, in which a high-speed lens is switched on and off rapidly in synch with the image being displayed to create nearly correct focus cues.
• Kevin Thompson of Optical Research Associates will lay out the future for the coming generation of head-worn displays, based on his work with Jannick Rolland of the University of Rochester's Institute of Optics.
• Masahiro Kawakita of NHK Science & Technology Research Labs, Japan will present an overview and a prototype of 3-D TV system based on integral photography technology.
• Gregg Favalora of Acutality Systems will present an overview of one type of technology that moves away from glasses: volumetric displays, which project images onto high-speed rotating screens.
• Brian Schowengerdt of the University of Washington will describe a volumetric display that scans multiple color-modulated light beams across the retina of the viewer to form images of virtual objects with correct focus cues.
• Nasser Peyghambarian of the University of Arizona will present a prototype of a large-area 3-D updateable holographic display using photorefractive polymers. The rewritable polymer material is a significant breakthrough for holographic display technology.