[Petapixel] has an interesting post about a startup company’s new holographic display that claims to be “indistinguishable from reality.” The company behind it, Light field Labs, claims their system requires no glasses and handles different angles.
You can see a bit in the [C|Net] video below, but — of course — being on YouTube, you can’t get a sense for how good the 3D effect is.
It seems that while a lot of displays try to project into a 3D volume or onto a flat display media, “solid light” works a lot more like a real hologram, using a phase guide to project light at different phases and allows inference like an actual hologram.
The video shows that you can even use a magnifying glass to take a look at the object and it still looks real. We couldn’t help but notice though, that the demo was in a dark place — it was made to look like an artistic choice, but we’ll bet that under bright lighting, they have difficulty delivering the image. Still, pretty impressive.
We have no idea about cost, but imagine it won’t be cheap to start with. The company claims you will be able to see these in the real world as early as next year.
If you want to learn a lot more about standard holograms, we’ve talked about them before. Light field hacking isn’t exactly new, but this looks like it might be ready for prime time soon.
