A practical new approach to holographic video could also enable
2-D displays with higher resolution and lower power consumption.
Imagine a room that responds to your verbal commands for
information by projecting that information onto a wall display,
or even verbally answering your request. What if the room even
volunteers related information you hadn't thought of? Move over,
Star Trek. MIT scientists are going beyond fiction to develop
such an intelligent room. Their prototypes -- a conference room
and a personal office -- can already do the tasks described
above (and more) for specific scenarios. In one demo, the room
serves as a "command center" for hurricane disaster relief; in
another, it helps a student give a virtual tour of the
Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, where the room is being
developed. The idea is to make computers (which run the room)
"not only genuinely user-friendly but also essentially invisible
to the user," the researchers say. Thus, rather than typing on a
keyboard, a user interacts