Forget 3D, holograms are coming to smartphones
Incoming `mixed reality' technology promises floating images and 3D calls on the small screen
Forget FaceTime - why not say hello with a hologram? Imagine making a holo-call on your phone, with a 3D image of the caller appearing to leap out at you from the phone screen.
“The idea of using hologram technology in a smartphone is that you would be able to project a 3D image into space at a certain short distance away from the device,“ says Waiman Lam, VP, global marketing, ZTE Mobile Devices, who believes holo-phones are at the pre-research stage. “We estimate that it will still be at least a few years or more until we see hologram phones,“ he says.
What's the delay?
“Technically the concept of a hologram is physically impossible, because you would need to stop a light beam at a point in space,“ says Karl Woolley, creative technologist at FrameStore, which is working with the super-secretive Magic Leap, a company that's working to create a 3D world by projecting images into your eye.
He explains that it's only when light bounces off something that we see brightness and colour.
For now, the only way you can stop light and create a convincing hologram on a phone is by using a glass pyramid on the screen itself.The effect is good, but it's hardly a pocketfriendly design.
Holo-phone exists?
That said, it's already possible to see holograms on your phone using Virtual Presence units. “Viewers simply place their phone in the Virtual Presence unit and press play, and a convincing hologram appears in front of them, f loating in mid-air,“ says Sharad Kumar, co-founder, Virtual Presence.
“It uses a patented design built around a miniaturised pro jection technique, using your smartphone and a robust, yet near-invisible material.“
Putting your phone in a box?
Not quite what we had in mind.The concept of a holo-phone prob ably means re-thinking the idea of what a phone is. If you stop light with a screen or a filter, you can create holograms; cue the light engine inside Microsoft's HoloLens. HoloLens augments reality.
“3D is a simulation, holography is not,“ says Woolley, explaining that while 3D appears on a screen, holography appears in your space and is rendered through 360 degrees.
Dynamic holography
But do we only need holographic phones?
What purpose would it serve beyond games or entertainment? One use is in cars. And Jaguar Land Rover is already using lasers to create a hologram-driven heads-up display on the windshields of its Range Rover Evoque vehicles. The latter relies on a technology called dynamic holography. So is this the missing link for holophones? “No,“ says Jamieson Christmas, who created dynamic holography, and now specialises in AR displays. Christmas believes modern phones don't have the computational power to cope with dynamic holography.
Mixed reality future
In the world of holographic technology, and in mixed reality, there are a lot of concepts vying for adoption in devices.
An unknown quantity and a possible game-changer is Magic Leap, which has picked up investment from Google and Alibaba to develop a `cinematic reality' technology that projects a digital light field into a user's eye, to create realistic images over the physical world. It's constructing a virtual retina display that superimposes 3D graphics onto real world scenes.
“ The technology has the ability to accurately place objects and make them look like they're in your environment,“ says Wooley, who's working with Magic Leap. Called `Dynamic Digitised Lightfield Signal', Magic Leap will still be hardware -some kind of head-mounted display will be needed to deliver the light -but it will lack a screen.
However, from what little we know about Magic Leap, one thing is for sure: it will cut out the screen, effectively implanting content even a computer's user interface into our brains. It sounds like a step towards something totally new .
Source: The Economic Times, June 16, 2016
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