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Comment by wlievens | Hacker News Reader

> Despite the fact that the light is originating at 2 cm from the eye, it can appear to originate at 2 km from the eye, in that 2 km is that distance that the eye will have to accommodate to to put that light in focus.

But there's a wall in front of it. How can I perceive an object as 10m away when I'm staring at a wall at 2m away?

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Conventional holography proves this is possible. Portions of the image of a hologram can appear at points both closer and farther than the plane of the hologram itself. Furthermore, reflection holograms can be recorded in opaque media, so the parts of the hologram that form farther the hologram plane appear to be "inside" the hologram. See, for example, this photograph of one of the first three-dimensional holograms: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Hologrammit.jpg . The hologram plane is demarcated by the sharp transition from red to black at the bottom, but the object in the hologram appear to be behind the hologram plane.

The wall will appear as if it:

- were translucent, and

- had a screen behind it

The light arrives at your eye containing both an image of a wall when focusing at 3m and an image of a TV show when focusing at 20m.

Such a light field is not distinguishable from the light field that would occur if the wall actually were translucent and actually did have a TV show playing on a screen behind it

i think his question has less to do with how your system will render the information about what's behind the wall, and more to do with how your system will acquire that information in the first place

I think that in the future, the following phenomena are likely to proliferate:

- high-res satellite and airplane imaging of the globe

- public geotagged photos, including compass bearing

- Google Street View road images

- public security cameras on public streets

All of this data can be integrated using software like Microsoft's PhotoSynth, to stitch together a gigantic 3D model of the real globe.

Then, people with Voxel Vision will be able to look around at streets and landmarks that are interesting but physically occluded.

3d data of the surroundings could be also obtained with a portable sound-to-3d sonar system.. not sure if such exists yet but it would be a cool thing to connect to your device for enhanced bat-sight.

I saw this documentary once about a man who was half bat, half man. He implemented something like this using mobile phones in the area he wanted to look at.

I think he must not have gotten the sonar parts in his half bat bits.

He did have the help of one particular Magical Negro [http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MagicalNegro]

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