In front of me is a wristwatch. Somehow, it’s floating in the air.
It looks no different from a Rolex: Shiny, spotless and seemingly solid. Light reflects across the metal timepiece like it’s on display at a jewelry store, ready to be handled and bought. But then I get closer and try to touch the floating watch. My hand presses through it and feels only air.
My eyes tell me the watch is real. But in reality, I’m staring at a wave of light that’s converging and scattering in mid-air. A display behind the watch is simply beaming the light in a way my eyes can’t help but interpret as real.
In other words, I’m staring at a hologram. The first of its kind, according to San Jose-based Light Field Lab. The watch in front of me is actually an image made up of 2.5 billion pixels. All those pixels are now in my line of sight, making me wonder, did I just glimpse the future?
I won’t be alone in witnessing the technology, which is called SolidLight. Light Field Labs says it plans on debuting the holographic displays as soon as next year. “We can show that this is real. We can start building this,” says CEO Jon Karafin.
Using Light to Create Images in Mid-Air
The word hologram may cause you to roll your eyes. Go to a technology trade show, music concert, or YouTube, and you can find plenty of other holograms. But they usually have a major limitation. The hologram may be contained in a glass box, rely on fan blades embedded with LEDs, or simply use giant mirrors to reflect a ghostly image on a thin polyester screen.
These approaches essentially try to dupe your eyes into thinking a 2D image exists in 3D. Light Field Lab, on the other hand, says its SolidLight display technology involves no elaborate tricks. According to Karafin, the company harnesses the established principles of how our eyes see objects—and replicates the same process with technology.
It reminds me of the sci-fi film The Matrix when Morpheus brings up a truth about how humans perceive reality. “If you're talking about what you can feel, what you can smell, what you can taste and see, then 'real' is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain,” he says.
You can apply the same statement to human eyes: What's real is simply photons bouncing off objects being interpreted by our brains. Take a bird, for example. “You don’t see in the real world that wing of this bird,” Karafin says. “You see it because those photons will strike and interact with that finite point (the bird’s wing) and create a wavefront that your eye is able to focus on.”
So if you had a machine capable of controlling light, you could emit photons and re-order them to create images—even though the object itself isn't there. That’s essentially what Light Field Lab has achieved using today's display technology. The company has mastered how light can be beamed to recreate 3D floating objects that appear like their real-life counterparts would.
A standard TV generally has millions of pixels beaming the light in only one uniform direction. Light Field Lab’s holographic tech changes this by sending the photons into a central area, where the light can converge and then scatter, forming images visible to the human eye.
“It has been thought of as the holy grail of displays. It has been thought of as the impossible,” Karafin says. However, the company cracked the code through a custom 28-inch display it can produce for customers. The panel is not only capable of scattering photons into discernible images, but it can do so through an insanely high 2.5 billion pixels.
Seeing the Holograms for Myself
Of course, seeing is believing. Last week, Light Field Lab invited me to their offices in San Jose. That’s where I encountered “Cammy,” a holographic chameleon, inside a dimly lit room. SolidLight's display generated the digital lizard across a 12-by-12-inch floating image.
It wasn’t flawless. The company’s display could only generate the chameleon at over 100 nits of brightness. Hence, the hologram was best viewed in movie theater-like conditions. Nevertheless, for a moment, from a distance of about 2-3 meters, the chameleon looked almost real. It also seemed to have weight and volume as I moved my head from side to side, inspecting the critter from various angles.
Once I got closer, I began to notice the swarm of pixels fizzing across Cammy’s skin. The chameleon then warped and blipped out of existence the moment I stepped out of the display’s 100-degree field of view. I tried to touch Cammy, but of course felt nothing. The photons simply continued to beam the hologram around my fingers.
Light Field Lab then condensed the 2.5 billion pixels into an even smaller 2-by-2-inch image of a wristwatch. This was the demo that really impressed me. The image was small, but the hologram’s density was nearly indistinguishable from reality. It was only when I was about a foot away from the hologram did I see the pixels percolating across the watch’s metal band.
If only everyone could experience what I saw. The problem is a 2D picture or a video can’t quite capture the feeling of seeing a 3D hologram in mid-air. The company provided the video of Cammy shown above. However, Light Field Lab asked me not to record any photos of what I saw over worries that publishing the pictures might underwhelm readers.
Still, the company says it’ll only be a matter of time before consumers begin to see SolidLight technology in action. The 28-inch display from Light Field Lab is actually a modular product, meaning you can stack them together like bricks to create an even larger holographic screen.
Why Holographic Displays Could Be in Our Future
Light Field Lab has already been producing several larger displays in 90-, 120-, and 150-inch sizes, and beyond. Its first enterprise customers are expected to begin debuting them as soon as next year, although a more conservative estimate is within a "one- to three-year" timeframe.
The larger displays cost several millions dollars and currently rely on a server feeding them 3D digital content. So for now, the technology will likely first pop up in entertainment venues, such as theme parks, where they’ll beam 3D images of things like dolphins, sharks, and dinosaurs that approach the audience.
“Ultimately, the goal is you won’t even know you saw a hologram when you walk through an experience,” Karafin says. “I want people to say, ‘Wow, that actor was amazing.’”
I experienced a mere taste of the company’s technology. The demos I saw were restricted to depicting cute creatures and a wristwatch. But I can't help but wonder what a person would look like on the holographic display. Might it be akin to meeting the same person in real life?
Karafin seems to think so. In a concept image, he showed the company's display tech both sending and receiving holographic images over a video-conferencing call. "That experience can in fact be identical to feeling like you look through the wall and you see another room across the world—right there," he says.
So it's not hard to imagine the same displays one day popping up at the office or at your home. A video call with a friend or a PC game might feel more real than ever. The same technology could also be placed across walls, creating a Star Trek-like Holodeck, capable of beaming holograms, no matter the angle.
“There are many hundreds of other applications and our belief is that there is no other technology that could touch so many different markets and applications than a holographic display,” Karafin adds.
Getting there will take time. Like other next-generation TV tech such as 8K, Light Field Lab estimates it’ll need several years to bring down SolidLight's manufacturing costs. The company will also need to work with industry partners to create a content ecosystem for the holographic displays. It’ll be no easy task, but Light Field Lab already counts Samsung, Verizon, and Comcast among its investors. In the meantime, the company is starting to accept applications for SolidLight display system pre-orders.
Perhaps, the real test is whether the holograms will impress the public, or if it’ll be relegated to a mere gimmick. All I can say is I want to see more.