My father was a professional photographer.  He worked hard to master his craft and he built his own cameras to his own precise specifications.  I watched him build them in his workshop, fascinated by the process.  In those days, a camera was a large and bulky box with a frosted glass plate in the back for focusing—you stuck your head under a black velvet hood to line up the shot.  The image was upside down on the glass, so you had to mentally invert it.  (Talk about your single-lens reflex system!)

Every exposure required an 8x10 sheet of film.  You loaded each sheet into one side of a large two-sided plate — kind of like a cartridge-thing, only huge.  You put a sheet of film on each side and you slid a covering slide over each piece of film to protect it from the light.  Did I mention that you had to do this in the darkroom, so called because you were literally working in the dark?  You loaded the film into the plates in total darkness, by feel alone.  You couldn’t risk even the slightest smidge of light.  You couldn’t even risk a spark of static electricity.  (I loaded film for my dad a few times.  It was time consuming and tedious.  It was not my idea of fun.  I’ve had fun, this wasn’t it.)  You loaded up as many plates as you expected to use and lugged them around in a heavy case.   

When you were ready to take a picture, you slid the cartridge-thing into the back of the camera, just in front of the glass panel, pulled out the slide that protected the film from light, squeezed the air-pressure bulb that clicked the shutter, slid the covering slide back over the film, pulled out the cartridge-thing, flipped it over, reinserted it into the camera so you could expose the film on the flip side.

It can be kind of hard to get excited over advances in advertising technology, but this new video from RealFiction is enough to get us interested. It shows off the company’s new holographic display, called the Dreamoc, which combines physical and virtual elements to create a pretty compelling effect.

The video shows a cell phone placed inside the display’s pyramidal glass case, with a rotating hologram “emerging” from the devices display. It’s a snazzy effect, and definitely worth a watch.

There’s no word on how much the display will cost, or how widely available it will be, so it’s too soon to say whether the Dreamoc’s going to be just a toy for the most upscale retailers or if you’ll see one in your neighborhood GameStop. Either way, it’s always good to see advances in the commercial application of 3D imagery. Hopefully it won’t be too long before this sort of technology becomes practical for consumer displays.

Check out the video and give us your opinions!