Here’s Something Far Closer To The Idea Of A Holographic Display, And The Company Doesn’t Use The H Word
September 25, 2024 by Dave Haynes
This is far, far, far closer to being a hologram than most of the companies marketing their two-dimensional display tech as holographic, but even though the visual is genuinely three-dimensional, the company doing it doesn’t even drop the H word.
This is a 3D Volumetric display developed by the Adelaide, Australia tech lab Voxon, with the talking head married to an AI platform to make it a responsive chat bot.
From CEO/founder Gavin Smith on a Linkedin post:
“Genie”, one of our 3D Unity applications, is an interactive volumetric avatar. As you can see, Genie is visible from 360 degrees, and from the opposite side, you even get to see the famous “hollow mask illusion”, described by wikipedia as a ” when the bias of seeing faces as convex is so strong it counters competing monocular depth cues”….
The demo is running on a pre-production Voxon Photonics VX2 display. The display is in a glass cylinder because there are moving parts.
If volumetric displays are unfamiliar (likely the case with most readers), here’s an explanation:
The Voxon VX2 stands out from other 3D displays because it produces true volumetric images, meaning the images occupy a physical volume and can be seen from all sides, much like a real object. Unlike stereoscopic 3D displays that rely on tricking the brain with two slightly different images for each eye, the VX2 doesn’t require any special eyewear and doesn’t suffer from issues like eye strain or limited viewing angles. This makes it a revolutionary tool for displaying 3D content in a way that is natural and intuitive.
Persistence of vision is the phenomenon where the human eye retains an image for a short time after it disappears, allowing us to perceive a sequence of rapidly changing images as continuous.
Most of what you see peddled as holographic – like transparent LCD screens, some transparent LED products and those madly-spinning LED light sticks – has only two dimensions and no physical volume.
I did a podcast with Smith in March 2023.
Very cool