Who can forget that famous scene from Star Wars, where R2D2 plays a holographic video message in midair showing Princess Leila pleading for help from Obi-Wan Kenobi? While technology has not yet progressed sufficiently to achieve the Star War’s feat, recent advances in the ability to control light is opening up new possibilities for displaying 3D images.
Leila, an appropriately named company owned by David Fattal, has demonstrated a 2×2 inch holomodule as its first product. This LCD module is a 3D display capable of producing full-color 3D images and videos. You do not need special glasses to see these images and videos and they are visible from 64 different viewpoints.
Leila’s technology is based on an invention by Fattal. It utilizes advances in the ability to control the path of light at Nano-scale levels. Fattal calls this the multiview backlight and he developed this concept while working as a researcher in HP Labs. The Nano-scale structures are actually diffraction gratings.
Diffraction gratings act as tiny mirrors to reflect light in precise directions depending on the angle of the arriving beam. In practice, gratings are used to send light through cables for transmitting data. Fattal decided to use gratings to send light in prescribed directions in space, creating the basics of a holographic 3D display.
With Leila, Fattal has managed to refine the initial design for better image quality. The hologram comes out of a conventional LCD. Leila replaces the LCD backlight, which is typically made of plastic, with a more sophisticated light guide incorporating Nano-scale gratings. That means smartphones and other mobile devices will soon possess the ability to show 3D images.
On the other hand, Holus is an interactive holographic tabletop platform from the Canadian startup H+ Technology. Holus makes use of Pepper’s Ghost, an optical illusion, to reflect hidden objects in a manner that makes people believe the objects are present in the room with them. Therefore, rather than looking at a TV placed in a corner of the room, the future family will be sitting around a Holus box in the middle of the room. The Holus is a see-through tabletop box and it presents a tiny 3D digital world and allows you to interact with it.
Holus contains a see-through Plexiglas prism and projects four images of the same object onto the walls of the prism. Therefore, irrespective of the side of the prism you are on, these images collate to form a single 3D object, which you can see at different angles.
According to H+, you can feed any digital content from a computer into Holus to convert and project it as a 3D hologram-like image. You can also use motion-tracking technology to interact with the image, such as a gesture input device or a traditional gamepad. It is also possible to use the Brain Sensor electroencephalography headset from Emotiv.
The Halo tabletop box creates a social campfire experience in the home, as family members can cluster around the 3D display system, while interacting with it and with one another. On a wider scale, natural visual interaction with complex 3D images and digital content can help education immensely. Such holographic presentations will also help business activities.
