Zalman's Holographic 3D Fan Is Straight Out of Blade Runner
Zalman faced lots of financial problems over the last three years, which is why it hasn't released anything new for a while. We spoke with Zalman's marketing director and CEO during Computex 2018, though, and both said the company is preparing to make a comeback. They said Zalman is looking for new product ideas across many categories because it wants to offer something different from what's available today.
One thing that caught our attention in Zalman's suite at the Hyatt was a holographic 3D fan that belonged to a startup the company recently acquired. Contrary to similar products we've seen in the past, this one offers high quality images and videos, with impressive results. And, of course, the system also cools you down at the same time! You can also use multiple fans at once to display larger and more complex media.
You can see the fan in action in the video below.
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Aris Mpitziopoulos is a contributing editor at Tom's Hardware, covering PSUs.
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hannibal I don`t like led fans, or led DDR memory, but that was cool!Reply
Maybe 3D information about your pc temperature and other numericall information, or just have really cool graphical presentation about anything... dancer from the start wars, holographic Yoda giving lifetime advices. Really cool product! -
SavageFist That was a pretty cool demo. I could have sworn I've seen some videos with drones(you know since they have multiple 'fans')doing the same effect. That will make for some impressive advertising once it scales to larger sizes and other technical hurdles they may need to address.Reply -
bit_user Reply
No pictures with it turned off?21041028 said:...
I assume it has a USB interface?
Is there any data on the resolution?
What formats does it accept? What's the max length of the animations?
Any ETA on when it might be introduced? -
Aris_Mp Reply21041716 said:
No pictures with it turned off?21041028 said:...
I assume it has a USB interface?
Is there any data on the resolution?
What formats does it accept? What's the max length of the animations?
Any ETA on when it might be introduced?
It will take a year or so before it goes into mass production and the price will be quite stiff, over 1k USD. The videos need to go through a special processing in order to be compatible with this fan. This is the only information that we were able to obtain.
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zodiacfml Easy. The projector or led projector strobes the light to match the RPM of the fan. This makes the blades of the fan, seemingly not there.Reply
It looks three dimensional as the fan is not flat. You are projecting light to a surface that is not flat. The content is 3D adding more to the illusion