Future Timeline

Researchers have developed a prototype display that uses projection to create large-scale 3D images with ultra-high definition. The new approach helps overcome the limitations of light-field projection, which can create natural-looking 3D images that don't require special 3D glasses for viewing.

"Our optical design could make it practical to replace 2D flat panel displays with 3D images for digital signs, entertainment, education and other applications where 3D images provide a significant enhancement," said research team leader Byoungho Lee from Seoul National University in Korea. "Our design could also be modified to provide immersive experiences in movie theaters, for example."

In The Optical Society (OSA) journal Optics Letters, the researchers describe how they combine two different light-field display technologies to project large-scale 3D images with almost diffraction-limited resolution. The new display is autostereoscopic, which means that it produces different 3D images so that the image can be viewed from various angles.

The dream of holographic video has long been a staple of science fiction—the image of Princess Leia beamed from R2-D2 in Star Wars, the holodeck in Star Trek: The Next Generation, and the shark that pops out at Marty McFly in Back to the Future II are just three examples. Well, that fantasy is now poised to become reality, but without breaking the laws of physics. A Silicon Valley startup called Light Field Lab has developed the world’s first truly holographic digital-display technology, which I was privileged to see for myself during a visit to the company’s offices this week.

Before I tell you what it is, let me tell you what it isn’t. It’s not the technology used to resurrect Tupac Shakur on the concert stage at Coachella in 2012; that’s a 160-year-old effect called Pepper’s Ghost that literally uses smoke and mirrors to reflect 2D floating images. And it’s certainly not autostereoscopic 3D, which companies such as Samsung, Sony, Looking Glass, and Stream TV have demonstrated for years. That technology presents separate 2D images to each eye—as long as you’re in the right spot—and sometimes causes dizziness and nausea due to something called vergence-accommodation conflict, which can also plague glasses-based stereoscopic images and head-mounted displays.

Founded in 2017, Light Field Lab has developed a technology it calls SolidLight, which replicates exactly how light behaves in the real world. When you look at an object in the real world, light from the sun or other source reflects from the object at many different points in many different directions, some of which enters your eyes (see Fig. 1a). As you move around the object, different light rays—or, more properly, wavefronts—enter your eyes, and you see different perspectives. Also, objects behind it are blocked from view (occluded) differently.

Researchers have developed a new method to display highly realistic holographic images using 'holobricks' that can be stacked together to generate large-scale holograms.

The researchers, from the University of Cambridge and Disney Research, developed a holobrick proof-of-concept, which can tile holograms together to form a large seamless 3-D image. This is the first time this technology has been demonstrated and opens the door for scalable holographic 3-D displays. The results are reported in the journal Light: Science & Applications.

As technology develops, people want high-quality visual experiences, from 2-D high resolution TV to 3-D holographic augmented or virtual reality, and large true 3-D displays. These displays need to support a significant amount of data flow: for a 2-D full HD display, the information data rate is about three gigabits per second (Gb/s), but a 3-D display of the same resolution would require a rate of three terabits per second, which is not yet available.

Holographic displays can reconstruct high quality images for a real 3-D visual perception. They are considered the ultimate display technology to connect the real and virtual worlds for immersive experiences.

Holograms are a technology that has been expected for a long time, but has so far been rather disappointing. A research team from Disney and the University of Cambridge has now developed a technique with which holographic images and videos can also be produced on a large scale. This is made possible by so-called “holobricks” – modular optical devices whose partial projections can be combined to form a seamless image. In the future, holo displays the size of a cinema screen, composed of many smaller holobrick modules, are conceivable.

In science fiction films, holograms have been standard for many decades. Even in reality there are already some technologies that produce holographic videos or free-floating projections. So far, however, all these projections are quite small.

The reason for the scaling problem is the huge amount of data that is needed for a hologram. The larger the hologram viewing angle and area, the finer and higher resolution the holographic interference pattern needs to be. An HD display requires a data rate of around three gigabits per second for a two-dimensional image. With a hologram of the same resolution and size, it would be around three terabits per second, which is far more than is currently possible with current technology.

The holobricks could offer a solution to the problem, because each of these optical modules only has to generate a section of the image, so the resolution of the common hologram generators is sufficient for this.