Glasses-free 3-D TV looks nearer (w/ Video)

A new glasses-free 3-D video system uses three layered LCD panels displaying bizarre patterns (top three images) that collectively produce a coherent, high-resolution, multiperspective 3-D image. The bottom image illustrates, roughly, the composite image that would reach one eye at one viewing angle. Images courtesy of the Camera Culture group

Despite impressive recent advances, holographic television, which would present images that vary with varying perspectives, probably remains some distance in the future. But in a new paper featured as a research highlight at this summer’s Siggraph computer-graphics conference, the MIT Media Lab’s Camera Culture group offers a new approach to multiple-perspective, glasses-free 3-D that could prove much more practical in the short term.

Instead of the complex hardware required to produce holograms, the Media Lab system, dubbed a Tensor Display, uses several layers of liquid-crystal displays (LCDs), the technology currently found in most flat-panel TVs. To produce a convincing 3-D illusion, the LCDs would need to refresh at a rate of about 360 times a second, or 360 hertz. Such displays may not be far off: LCD TVs that boast 240-hertz refresh rates have already appeared on the market, just a few years after 120-hertz TVs made their debut.

“Holography works, it’s beautiful, nothing can touch its quality,” says Douglas Lanman, a postdoc at the Media Lab and one of the new paper’s co-authors. “The problem, of course, is that holograms don’t move. To make them move, you need to create a hologram in real time, and to do that, you need … little tiny pixels, smaller than anything we can build at large volume at low cost. So the question is, what do we have now? We have LCDs. They’re incredibly mature, and they’re cheap.”

Switchable Nano Magnets May Revolutionize Data Storage: Magnetism of Individual Molecules Switched

Graphene on boron nitride work may lead to breakthrough in microchip technology

 Graphene is the wonder material that could solve the problem of making ever faster computers and smaller mobile devices when current silicon microchip technology hits an inevitable wall. Graphene, a single layer of carbon atoms in a tight hexagonal arrangement, has been highly researched because of its incredible electronic properties, with theoretical speeds 100 times greater than silicon. But putting the material into a microchip that could outperform current silicon technology has proven difficult.

The answer may lie in new nanoscale systems based on ultrathin layers of materials with exotic properties. Called two-dimensional layered materials, these systems could be important for microelectronics, various types of hypersensitive sensors, catalysis,tissue engineering and energy storage. Researchers at Penn State have applied one such 2D layered material, a combination of graphene and hexagonal boron nitride, to produce improved transistor performance at an industrially relevant scale.

“Other groups have shown that graphene on boron nitride can improve performance two to three times, but not in a way that could be scaled up. For the first time, we have been able to take this material and apply it to make transistors at wafer scale,” said Joshua Robinson, assistant professor of materials science and engineering at Penn State and the corresponding author on a paper reporting their work in the online version of the journal ACS Nano.

In the article, the Penn State team describes a method for integrating a thin layer of graphene only one or two atoms thick, with a second layer of hexagonal boron nitride (hBN) with a thickness of a few atoms up to several hundred atoms. The resulting bilayer material constitutes the next step in creating functional graphene field effect transistors for high frequency electronic and optoelectronic devices.

Previous research by other groups has shown that a common material called hexagonal boron nitride (hBN), a synthetic mixture of boron and nitrogen that is used as an industrial lubricant and is found in many cosmetics, is a potential replacement for silicon dioxide and other high-performance dielectrics that have failed to integrate well with graphene. Because boron sits next to carbon on the periodic table, and hexagonal boron nitride has a similar arrangement of atoms as graphene, the two materials match up well electronically. In fact, hBN is often referred to as white graphene. To be of more than academic interest in the lab, however, the hBN-graphene bilayer had to be grown at wafer scale – from around 3 inches (75 mm) to almost 12 inches (300 mm).

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