What They Say
An article by CNet drew our attention to a Silicon Valley start-up that is developing light field displays, Light Field Lab. Investors in the firm include Samsung, Comcast and Verizon. According to the article, the company could have some real devices being made last year. The 28″ devices can be tiled to create bigger devices, but for live rendering, you need multiple synchronised GPUs.
What We Think
There is quite an impressive video demo on the firm’s website The firm said that the ‘solid light surface panel’ has around 2.5 billion pixels, equivalent to 40 billion pixels/m². Just to give a sense of scale, that means that to create the image takes around 100 4K displays or 25 8K displays. Alternatively, you could use fewer imagers and time multiplex them.
Live demos of the display had a ‘digital lizard’ in an overall image of a 30cm x 30cm (12″ x 12″)( image with just 100 cd/m² of brightness. It apparently looked good from around 2-3 metres away.
The good thing about this firm is that they do seem to actually understand what a hologram is. The less attractive aspect, to me, is that its ‘future vision’ art is as unrealistic as that shown by Magic Leap. I first wrote a paper about holography over 50 years ago and although live holograms are getting better and nearer, we’re still decades away, I think, from the kind of vision shown. Then again, if you had shown me a photo of Sony’s Crystal LED when I saw my first RGB LED wall, I probably wouldn’t have believed it. (but the C LED and the first were decades apart). (BR)
