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"Quick, tell me in detail how that holographic projection of yours actually works." The old president waved Ryan over, and the two of them sat down on a stone bench at the roadside, the old man pressing the question with enormous interest.
As he spoke, he even fished a pair of glasses out of his pocket and put them on, the better to see Ryan clearly.
Faced with the old president's knowledge-starved gaze, Ryan smiled, and without the slightest hesitation laid the technology's principle out for him.
"Honestly, it's only a small trick. Nothing you'd call an epoch-making technology."
He went on.
"The holographic projection people commonly see today generally uses a holographic film to achieve the 3D image, and the venue's lighting has to be arranged to hide the film itself, so the audience never notices it's there."
"My holographic projection works instead on the principle of acoustic tweezers, which is to say, the technology of steering the movement of tiny objects with sound waves. It controls thousands of minute particles in the air, arranging them into the frame of whatever object needs imaging, and at the same time, special light from several different angles illuminates that frame, forming a complete three-dimensional image."
The old president listened, ran the sums in his head, and spoke up in astonishment. "That is no small trick of the sort you're describing!"
Set aside entirely the matter of using acoustic tweezers to control so numerous a crowd of fine particles, and of making them compose themselves into particular shapes. The question alone of how the light, striking that particle-built frame, came out showing the correct colors was a massive undertaking in itself.
"Then how do you make the light display the right colors?" He hurried the doubt in his heart straight into words.
Ryan smiled. "Objects absorb light selectively. We can have the acoustically controlled particles absorb specific portions of the light, and each variety of particle absorbs differently. Control which particles go where, and you control the colors of the displayed image."
And if the displayed image made no demand for especially vivid color, the holographic projector could even take command of the sparse dust drifting in the air and project with that.
The holographic projection at the mech announcement back at the beginning, and Prism's holographic displays since, had come from exactly this. The imagery in both had been fairly monochrome, and neither had demanded much more.
The old president opened his mouth and closed it again, no longer sure how such a technology ought even to be described.
Executing operations this fine on particles by acoustic tweezers wasn't merely a question of the technical equipment. It reached into programming, into the particle materials themselves...
Had he not personally seen the holographic imagery shown at Prism's launch events, and had the person sitting in front of him been anyone but Ryan, he'd have put the odds of believing in such a technology at very nearly zero.
Ryan gave the old president a moment to catch his breath, and then talked through several of the foundational technical details with the old man.
The old president had little real background in acoustics, but the basic conceptions he could broadly follow.
A detailed, thorough back-and-forth soon swept his doubts away completely.
Before long, the two of them had moved on to the matter of cooperation.
"Your technology is already mature. There's no genuine need to bring us in on it at all." Having heard Ryan through, the old president understood this to be a finished technology, one that had no need whatsoever of his school wedging in a foot.
Cooperation of that sort would amount to freeloading on completed results to pad out achievements, and he would not permit such a thing to happen under his own eyelids.
Ryan shook his head. "You're imagining it too ideally. If this technology were fully mature, I'd have released it into the world long ago."
He smiled wryly. "The technology still has serious problems."
"To start with, the current machine can only control a thousand particles through its acoustic tweezers. Images projected with them are limited not just in size. Even the color rendering and the display range are heavily constrained."
"That's also why every holographic image you've seen from us has been housed inside a display case. A single machine can only project an image about that large."
The old president asked, "Then why not chain the machines together? With each machine controlling its own thousand particles, the limit ought to break quite easily."
At the old president's plainspoken idea, Ryan felt on the spot that he had found a kindred soul.
But chaining multiple projectors together was nowhere near that easy.
He answered, "At present, all I can manage is chaining five machines or fewer, and even that only yields an image roughly the size of a person."
"Push the chained count any higher, and the control programming becomes the critical problem. And I'm ordinarily very busy."
Ryan smiled, and the old president understood at once.
The programming spoken of here was not something settled by tapping at a computer and writing out some code.
Beyond computing itself, the programmers would need a genuinely sufficient grasp of optics and of acoustics before they had any hope of writing control programs good enough for the job.
Exactly like the mechs, this was an interdisciplinary project through and through.
The old president nodded. "I understand now."
"Mm-hm!" Ryan nodded back, smiling.
"You brat came back to your school to round up laborers!" The old president, not polite in the least, punctured him with a single sentence.
"Ahem!" Ryan cut the old president's words short. "This is research cooperation. School-enterprise cooperation. Who's rounding up laborers?"
The old president chuckled. "Then we'll go by your wording. We'll call it school-enterprise cooperation."
"I'll ask around among the capable teams in the school, and see whether any of them are willing to work for you."
"Then you have my sincere thanks."
"Come on, then. Shall I take you through the school canteen one more time?"
"Better not. I've arranged to meet someone." Ryan made his excuses in a hurry.
Truthfully, after growing used to the delicious cooking inside the base, his palate had been thoroughly spoiled, and he had no wish to attempt the canteen again.
"Fine, fine. If you've got business, off you go. Come back and visit when you have the time!"
The old president waved a hand, and the two of them parted there.
Once Ryan was in the car, it drove straight for the hotel.
His father and mother were there waiting for him.
The car soon pulled into the hotel's parking structure, and the guards accompanying him brought him up to his room.
And in the room directly next to his was his parents' room.
He knocked, and his mother came to open the door at once.
"Son, you're back!" The instant the door opened, an emotional hug was already arriving.
"The boy's birthday only just passed. Surely there's no need for quite this much enthusiasm..." his father said from inside the room.
"That's you being heartless! Our son is about to take an award that big, and you can't produce one shred of excitement!" His mother rolled her eyes at him.
"How does that make me heartless? I'm simply used to it. The excitement wouldn't come up on short notice, that's all..."
"All right, all right. Mom, have some fruit."
Ryan washed the fruit he'd bought along the way, arranged it on a plate, and offered it to the two elders.
The base had no local specialties worth carrying home, so a little roadside fruit had to stand in as the token of his feelings.
His father and mother, of course, minded not in the least. With a son this accomplished, what could there possibly be left to mind?
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