Holograms were invented in 1947, and ever since, they’ve been a source of awe and wonder. Perhaps the marvelous thing about them is they allow us to experience the virtual and real-world simultaneously. They are considered by many as a perfect way to represent objects with light. However, due to technological limitations, their widespread commercialization hasn’t been possible.
But now Samsung may be close to realizing that dream. The company has made significant strides towards realistic holograms in everyday use. It has developed a prototype thin-panel device that can display 4k resolution 3D images with a wide viewing angle. The device’s holographic display allows high-resolution 3D videos to be viewed from various angles and is so thin it can be incorporated into a smartphone.
Master Hong-Seok Lee, a researcher at Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology in South Korea, said:
The holographic display delivers the most realistic visual representation of our reality. We show the first working system of a slim holographic display. The display components are about 1 centimeter thick in total, so more research is needed before it can be used in smartphones, but it will not take very long.
Lee continued:
While a conventional display depicts images based on the light intensity, holograms control not just the intensity of light but also its phase to produce images that appear three-dimensional.
A genuine hologram is a 3D image that appears to pop out of a 2D screen – an effect typically created by lasers that modulate light in just the right way, giving the illusion of depth. According to Jungkwuen An, a Principal Researcher at SAIT, this depth perception is the key reason why holographic displays are seen as the ideal form of 3D display.
An said:
The human eye utilizes various depth perception cues, including binocular parallax, two pupil angles, focus adjustment, and motion parallax,2 to recognize the depth of an object. While most 3D display methods provide only some of these cues, a hologram provides them all. It perfectly replicates objects with light, producing images that look as lifelike as the real thing.
The main technological limitation holograms face today is that the viewing angle becomes narrower as a screen size increases, and vice versa. The SAIT team found a way around this issue of narrowing viewing angles by introducing a holographic video processor, a light tilting mechanism, and developing an optical element called a steering-backlight unit (S-BLU). The new setup increases a 3D video’s viewing angle by 30 times!
Kanghee Won, a Samsung Staff Researcher, explained:
An S-BLU consists of a thin, panel-shaped light source called a coherent-backlight unit (C-BLU), which transforms an incident beam into a collimated beam, and a beam deflector, which can adjust the incident beam to the desired angle. A conventional 4K screen 10 inches in size offers a very small viewing angle of 0.6°. However, you can expand the viewing angle roughly 30-fold by bending the image toward the viewer using S-BLU.
The result is a thin device under 10 cm (4 in) thick, with a flat 10.1-in display that can ‘project’ holograms with 4K resolution at 30 frames per second.
The technology could make possible the incorporation of holographic video displays in household electronics and mobile devices. It could also be used to produce virtual-navigation cues and blueprints or facilitate hospital visits, and so much more.
Deepak Sahoo, from the UK’s Swansea University, said:
This work paves the way for devices like smartphones, tablets, or computer monitors to have user-friendly holographic displays. The system could be scaled further to make handheld holographic displays and personal holographic digital tools.
The team says the technology still has a way to go before it’s a part of our daily lives. Doing so would require the development of holographic filming devices, holographic content, and processes for transmitting the vast amounts of data generated. All that’s in addition to perfecting the holographic display, so it resembles the ones we’ve seen in sci-fi films.
Lee said:
The ultimate goal of a holographic display would be to deliver the most realistic representation, where people cannot tell the difference between real objects and virtually generated ones.
When holograms do start popping up around us, it’ll begin in subtle applications.
Won said:
For example, we may start seeing limited use of holograms to produce things like keypads and even holographic menus. As holograms become more common, we’ll also begin to see more use of non-contact UIs (user interfaces) based on finger gestures, voice, eye tracking, brain wave recognition, and other forms of input.
A couple of other recent breakthroughs with the technology include Tokyo scientists creating the ‘first true hologram movie‘ and a team of Turkish physicists creating real Star Trek-style 3D holograms.
