Number 285 (Story #1), September 9, 1996 by Phillip F. Schewe and Ben Stein A 3-DIMENSIONAL, FULL-COLOR SOLID-STATE DISPLAY has been created by a team of scientists at Stanford, IBM-Almaden, and SDL Corp. in San Jose. Elizabeth Downing and her colleagues shine a pair of infrared lasers into a sugar-cube-sized piece of heavy metal fluoride glass. The criss-crossing laser beams are aimed at individual volume elements (voxels) in the transparent cube. Doped with rare-earth atoms, the tiny voxels sequentially absorb the pair of infrared photons and then emit single visible-light photons. By scanning the beams through plane after plane (which fluoresce in succession at blue, green, or red wavelengths), a full-color, 3-dimensional image can be created. Like the 2D image cast on a television picture screen, the 3D image persists in the viewer's perception because it is refreshed 30 to 60 times every second. So far only wire-frame figures or simple shapes can be rendered. Unlike holographic, stereoscopic, or virtual-reality displays, Downing's device requires no special viewing equipment and does not restrict the angle of viewing. What keeps this technique of 3D imaging from being applied any time soon to medical imaging or computer-assisted design is the relatively small size of the cube and the enormous data load needed to specify the image. (Elizabeth Downing et al., Science, 30 August 1996; an accompanying picture can be viewed on the Web at /png/)