Star Wars: 3D hologram phones like those seen in 1977 blockbuster will be on market within five years – Mirror Online.

These are not holograms but stereoscopic images projected onto a stream of vapor creating 3D appearance.

A true hologram is based on the phase interference pattern created by two laser beams – one bouncing off a subject and the other going directly to the film. The interference or diffraction pattern between the bounced laser and the direct laser is then recorded on film. An identical laser to the recording laser is then projected onto the film, turning the diffraction pattern back into an image. Think of the film as acting like an incredibly fancy filter – narrow wavelength laser light hits the filter and then scatters in to the original image.

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In the past week or so, Youtube has made changes that broke the playing of 3D videos in Internet Explorer and Firefox. Videos appear to display properly in Chrome and Opera browser.

In IE and Firefox, 3D videos display like this, rather than in the full size of the viewer:

Al Caudullo  (3DGuy.tv) has found a work around: Go to each of your 3D videos on Youtube, and edit the “Tags” section and add:

yt:crop=16:9

I did this for all of my 3D videos and this did fix the problem.

Early last year I began tracking 3D news stories using news.google.com and a search for “3D”. Early on, a fair number of 3D stories were about 3D photography, 3D cameras and especially 3D content (movies, theaters, project systems) and 3D video games and displays.

Today, probably 95% of the stories are about 3D printing technology and 3D printing of products.

We know that consumption of 3D movies at theaters is up and the sale of 3D DVD discs and 3D HDTVs are also up strongly. But the popular meme is that 3D is dead which seems to shape news coverage.

3D is not dead, its just become ordinary and normal.

3D printing is the hot new thing (and it is).

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Cyclopital3D makes numerous 3D related camera accessories including interaxial extenders (convert your Sony TDxx or JVC TD1 to about a 6″ (15 cm) interaxial spacing), as well as filter and lens holders and macro 3D photography tools. For example, they have a Fujifilm W3 lens adapter, interaxial extender, and close up/macro adapter. Lots of neat stuff for 3D photographers and 3D cinematographers.

Instructions for the discount are located here: http://cyclopital3d.homestead.com/holiday_sale_2013.pdf

Their web site is here: http://cyclopital3d.homestead.com/

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• Guide to 3D Photography ebook available, SRP US $5.99

I am up to 13 terabytes of hard drive storage. When you shoot video and archive much of what you do, as well as create backups, you’ll use a lot of hard drive space!

Amazon is running a “Cyber Monday” deals week (the Monday after “Black Friday” deals) with deep discounts on disk and flash memory storage.

A 3 terabyte hard drive is $115 and a SanDisk Cruzer 32 GB USB Flash Drive is $12. I just bought several of the latter – nice backup storage for camera memory (via my notebook computer) when in the field.

And if you connect to the Internet, you get free back ups to the NSA data center! LOL

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