Speaking at a conference at Stanford University, Dr David Fattal, founder and CEO of Leia, a spin-off of HP Labs, has announced his plans to bring a holographic display technology for mobile devices to the market.
The new company now has full colour prototypes with improved resolution as it prepares for a product launch, reports website ExtremeTech.
The central point, and key to Fattal's technology is the use of diffraction gratings at each pixel to redirect the backlight in different directions.
The gratings are created by etching grooves in a thin sheet of glass. Placed under a conventional LCD, the gratings create as many as 64 different points of view — in an eight-by-eight grid.
Because it uses only diffraction, Leia’s system can calculate the needed light field in real time — much faster than more complex interference-based hologram generators. To complement the gratings, Leia has created a specialised, programmable LED backlight that it also manufactures.
Fattal claims that Leia’s diffraction-based system is much more efficient than traditional parallax barriers and lenticular designs for multiple position glasses-free 3D.
One other advantage Leia’s technology has over the eye-tracking approach is that Leia’s displays can be viewed by several people at once. Leia has also already coupled one of its prototypes with a Leap Motion sensor, allowing the creation of interactive applications.
For more on this, read the full story on ExtremeTech here