Savas Tay, a UA scientist, works on the 3-D holographic imaging display at the university's Optical Sciences Building. Tay is the lead scientist on the team that developed the device.

Photos by James S. Wood / arizona daily star

More Photos (1):

Other articles by Dan Sorenson:

Food-source, energy issues spur growth of farmers markets Death of pacifist M.D. took a Tucson original Students learn the power of the vote Baby's death spurs dad to do something positive Afghan visit, TSA ordeal for UA freshman Pumpkin humongous Study on bias in city contracts urges changes $3M Pima pound redo to be 1st phase of plan for future new facility Residents have mixed feelings on tree's demise Reversing cardiac disease

Trades/Construction
HILLSIDE
CONCRETE CARPENTER FOREMAN Health Care
Neurological Associates of Tucson
Operations Manager Customer Service
LA Z BOY
CUSTOMER SERVICE REPRESENTATIVES Health Care
Children's Pulmonary Specialist
MA/Peds Specailty Ofc Legal
Munger Chadwick P.L.C
Associat For Commercial & Corporate Transactions & litigation Technical
INSTALLER Office and Clerical
Dr. Wayne Goodner, DDS
Front Office PT

A 3-D holographic image that can be updated and viewed without special glasses may soon find its way from a UA optics lab to operating rooms and battlefield command centers.

And what the entertainment and advertising industries could do with a lifelike image apparently appearing in thin air is anyone's guess.

The unique component in this holographic system — a 4-inch-square glass-and-polymer display surface — is its ability to change, to be updated, rewritten, says Savas Tay, the lead scientist on this invention.

That holographic bird on your credit card can't turn into something else every few minutes, but Tay's display can take an image rendered in three dimensions — initially photographed or computer-generated — and display it on the display surface, followed by another and another.

In addition, the device requires no special glasses or headgear to see the image, unlike present-day virtual-reality systems.

The scientists who worked on the device first speak of using it as an aid in brain surgery or as a close-to-real-time battlefield display, but Tay and UA optical sciences professor Nasser Peyghambarian are not unaware of its much more commercial potential.

"You would go into Macy's Department Store and see these real images displaying different products. It would be like 'Star Wars,' where Princess Leia appears in thin air," says Peyghambarian.

In the operating room, Tay says, it could provide a doctor with 3-D views of the 3-D images CT and MRI scans already create — but that now must be viewed on two-dimensional computer screens.

"Right now (doctors) get CT scans and have to print them out," says Peyghambarian.

"In military and defense, imagine commanders standing around a battlefield table and they move things around and see things pretty much in real time," he says.

But for now, it's just a 4-inch-by-4-inch glass screen connected to a lab table the size of a pinball machine that is loaded with lasers, lenses, mirrors, power supplies, computer connections and things only an optical scientist could identify. It's in a spanking-new lab in the University of Arizona's College of Optical Sciences' new green-glass-and-copper building on the southeast corner of the UA Mall and North Cherry Avenue.

The heart of the innovation, says Tay, is the photorefractive polymer — a thin plastic film that reacts to light — that can hold an image indefinitely and be updated.

Tay says the method that allowed the polymer to hold the image and update it came to him "out of the blue" while at a meeting about that very problem.

At present, the limitations are in size — the small size of the screen and the large size of the lab version of the device.

A larger display, and updating it rapidly, will require more computing power, says Tay. But massive, fast and cheap computing power continues to emerge at a rate that should keep up with development, he says.

Cramming the pinball- machine-size collection of equipment into a "table-top" commercial unit is also possible, Tay says, but a challenge.

Tay says the work, which started about two years ago, was done in collaboration with Nitto Denko Technical Corp. and was funded by the U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research.

"Such a big result in two years is not very common," Tay says.

The just-published report on the innovation has already garnered worldwide press attention that Tay says he found surprising but pleasing.