Interactive Holographic Cinema

Abstract

In mainstream media and entertainment, holography is often misrepresented as single perspective non-stereoscopic imagery suggesting three-dimensionality. Traditional holographic artists, however, utilize a laser setup to record and reconstruct wavefronts to describe a scene in multi-perspective natural parallax vision ("auto-stereoscopic"). Although these approaches are mutually exclusive in practice, they share a similar goal of staging three-dimensional (3D) imagery for a window-like viewing experience. This thesis presents a non-waveform digital computer approach for recording, reconstructing, and experiencing holographic visualizations in a cinematic context. By recording 3D information from a scene using the structured light method, a custom computer program performs stereoscopic reconstruction in real-time during presentation. Artists and computer users could then use a hardware device, such as the Microsoft Kinect, to explore the holographic cinematic form interactively.