I saw some video of the actual Shinjuku Cat thing from the news, and it seems it only looks right from certain angles. If you look at the display from the side (e.g. if you walk counter-clockwise around the building and look at it from the next corner), everything looks really distorted. When I first heard of it, I was hoping it was some kind of actual holographic display, but it's just the usual 2D display showing an image that is matched to the viewing perspective of people in a certain area so that it looks 3D.
I saw some video of the actual Shinjuku Cat thing from the news, and it seems it only looks right from certain angles. If you look at the display from the side (e.g. if you walk counter-clockwise around the building and look at it from the next corner), everything looks really distorted. When I first heard of it, I was hoping it was some kind of actual holographic display, but it's just the usual 2D display showing an image that is matched to the viewing perspective of people in a certain area so that it looks 3D.
The limitations of current technology. But strictly speaking, any kind of projected image from and to a flat surface becomes 2D, so you can't have a real 3D 'popping out' from the screen. It's all but trickery of having the projected image containing parts of the building behind it so the thing looks like it 'pops out'.
The limitations of current technology. But strictly speaking, any kind of projected image from and to a flat surface becomes 2D, so you can't have a real 3D 'popping out' from the screen. It's all but trickery of having the projected image containing parts of the building behind it so the thing looks like it 'pops out'.
There are some actual volumetric displays, but the latest I've seen are very limited in projection volume, color reproduction, etc. The ones with a spinning or moving projection screen, laser ionization, or projecting onto smoke/fog would currently be hard to use to generate a high quality image that big. (Of course such a display would fill the corresponding volume of the building interior.)
They do make things akin to holographic displays that are closer to a workable approach. There are fairly small computer monitor-sized ones that utilize a technique rather like a lenticular print with a whole bunch (around 40 to 100) different view angles interlaced together such that each eye (or each person) sees the corresponding scene from its location. This company seems to make one that appears to really work: https://lookingglassfactory.com (I haven't had a chance to see one in person though so I can't attest to how convincing the 3D effect is.) So far the displays seem to only have perspective shift in one axis (left/right). I suppose you could do both left/right and up/down if you did the optics right and had as many view angles as the square of the horizontal number. Some of the current limitations seem to be the size of the display, viewable angle, and resolution, but if someone could scale up the technology to fill a billboard it could make the cat actually look right from different viewpoints around the building.