MIT developing super-realistic image system

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'6-D' pictures can look just like the real thing

By producing "6-D" images, an MIT professor and colleagues are creating unusually realistic pictures that not only have a full three-dimensional appearance, but also respond to their environment, producing natural shadows and highlights depending on the direction and intensity of the illumination around them.
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The process can also be used to create images that change over time as the illumination changes, resulting in animated pictures that move just from changes in the sun's position, with no electronics or active control.
To create "the ultimate synthetic display," says Ramesh Raskar, an associate professor at the MIT Media Lab, "the display should respond not just to a change in viewpoint, but to changes in the surrounding light."
Raskar and his colleagues will describe the system, which is based entirely on an arrangement of lenses and screens, on Aug. 11 at the annual SIGGRAPH (Special Interest Group on Graphics and Interactive Techniques) conference of the Association for Computing Machinery held in Los Angeles.
Three-dimensional images, created using a variety of systems that make separate images for each eye, have been around for many decades. The new MIT process could bring an unprecedented degree of realism to such images.
The basic concept is similar to those inexpensive 3-D displays sometimes used on postcards and novelty items, that use an overlay of plastic that contains a series of parallel linear lenses that create a visible set of vertical lines over the image. (It is a different approach from that used to create holograms, which require laser light to create.) In addition to three-dimensional images, these are sometimes used to present a series of images that change as you view them from different angles from side to side. This can simulate simple motion, such as a car moving along a road.
By using an array of tiny square lenses instead of the linear ones, such displays can also be made to change as you change the viewing angle up or down - making a "4-D" image. This reveals different views with horizontal as well as vertical movement of the viewer. The new "lighting aware" system adds additional layers of lenses and screens to add two more dimensions of change. The image that is seen is then not only based on the position of the viewer, but also on the direction of the illumination.
In an initial test of the principle, Raskar and his team created an image of a glass wine bottle, whose caustic (a term for the collection of light rays coming from a curved surface), shadows and highlights change with the illumination.
"Even if you have the best hologram out there," explains Raskar, when the angle of the light changes "if I have a hologram of a flower, and a real flower next to it, the hologram doesn't look real. All the shadows and all the reflections on that flower are not mimicked on that hologram."
The new system, still in a relatively low-resolution laboratory proof-of-concept, could have applications including pictures used for training purposes, he said. In training someone how to carry out industrial inspections, an image of the device to be inspected would respond just like a real object when the inspector shines lights on it from different angles, for example.
Because the system is being built by hand from custom-made parts, Raskar says, the present version costs about $30 per pixel to make. Since it takes thousands of pixels to create a recognizable image, practical devices at an affordable price will require significant further development. "It will be at least 10 years before we have any realistic practical-sized displays," he estimates.
The main applications ultimately would be for advertising and for entertainment, Raskar says. A similar system could even be adapted to produce motion pictures and moving computer displays as well, he says.
The research was done in collaboration with Martin Fuchs, Hans-Peter Seidel, and Hendrik P.A. Lensch, all of MPI Informatik, The work was partly funded by Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories.

Building microchips from the bottom up

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MIT develops novel self-assembly method that could break size barrier,
Using a novel system based on molecules that can assemble themselves into precise patterns, MIT researchers have come up with a way of beating size limitations that would otherwise crimp improvements in data-storage media and electronic microchips.

Such self-assembling molecular systems, called block copolymers, have been known for many years, but the problem was that the regular patterns they produced were well-ordered only over very small areas. The MIT researchers found a way to combine this self-assembly with conventional lithographic chip-making technology, so that the lithographic patterns provide a set of "anchors" to hold the structure in place, while the self-assembling molecules fill in the fine detail between the anchors.

The work, carried out by three MIT professors and three graduate students, is being reported this week in the journal Science.

Karl Berggren, the Emanuel E. Landsman Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering in MIT's Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, explains that without the lithographed "pillars" to anchor the pattern, the self-assembling molecules "would be a mess of randomly arranged lattices." But with the pillars, "the block copolymer lattice is sort of fooled by these pillars, and forms its array around them. They form a nice, ordered pattern around the pillars."

Edwin L. Thomas, Morris Cohen Professor of Materials Science and Engineering and head of the department, who is also a co-author of the paper, says that the original inspiration came from a graduate student, Ion Bita, who now works for Qualcomm in California. Bita explains that "by properly choosing the spatial distribution of the pillars to match a desired final structure, it was possible to consistently generate defect-free polymer nanostructures."

The molecules themselves are made from a pair of polymer chains that are bonded together. The chains are chemically different, like oil and water, and do not mix. As a result, when spread on a surface they naturally separate into an orderly array, forming a pattern of tiny balls, each about 20 nanometers across. By using similar molecules with shorter chains, the resulting structures could be made even smaller, says Caroline Ross, Toyota Professor in MIT's Department of Materials Science and Engineering.

"Nature allows you to get these really well-ordered structures without doing much work," because of the way the molecules assemble themselves, Ross says. "It sort of magically forms these structures."

By changing the spacing of the pillars they create on the chip surface, the new method makes it possible to control the size and spacing of the overall pattern, Berggren says. The pillars themselves are placed on the surface using advanced high-resolution electron-beam lithography methods that have also been developed at MIT.

The most immediate application will be for improving the storage capacity of magnetic storage systems such as the hard disk drives used in computers, he says. For that application, the new method could be tested within the next year or two, he says. "The state of the industry in magnetic media is really ready for this," Berggren says. "They really need something right now."

In the future, by creating more complex patterns in the lithographic part of the process, entire computer chips could be made this way, says Ross. "The ultimate goal would be a complete self-assembling chip structure," she says. The lithographic step, instead of just a regular grid of dots as in the present system, could produce a more complex pattern of dots, lines and junctions, with the block copolymers then filling in the patterns between them.

"Ultimately, this is a technology that is very high-resolution and very scalable," Berggren says. It could also be used for other kinds of devices, including energy technology applications such as electrodes for fuel cells.

MIT graduate students Joel Yang and Yeon Sik Jung also worked on the project. It was funded by the National Science Foundation, the Semiconductor Research Corp., the Nanoelectronics Research Initiative, King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology and Alfaisal University, and the Singapore-MIT Alliance.