SolidLight, a scalable holographic display for huge video walls

Allowing viewers to experience digital objects in the physical world that escape the screen and are indistinguishable from reality, the highest resolution holographic display platform ever designed is here.

Star Trek’s holodeck may not be real, yet, but Light Field Lab is moving towards that goal. For now, the highest resolution holographic display platform ever designed, named Solidlight, promises modular holographic video walls, offering an experience that flat screen technologies can never recreate. The company revealed this month its “first large-format modular holographic video walls feature 10 billion pixels per meter2 generating digital objects that escape the screen and merge with reality.”

Light Field Lab says that SolidLight is unlike anything you’ve experienced before., and it goes beyond holograms, representing the next generation of displays. Light Field Lab’s technologies combine unprecedented size, resolution and density to project SolidLight Objects that accurately move, refract and reflect in physical space. The directly emissive modular SolidLight Surfaces form dense converging wavefronts with billions of pixels of photonic resolution.

Untethered to gear, SolidLight enables viewers to experience digital objects in the physical world that escape the screen and are indistinguishable from reality. A video demonstration of the holographic content generated by a SolidLight Surface display is available publicly for the first time via a 2D video clip on the Light Field Lab website under the SolidLight section of “See It Now.”

Redefining what is perceived as real

SolidLight is a turnkey solution that delivers true holographic experiences with real-time interactivity powered by Light Field Lab’s proprietary WaveTracer hardware and software, in conjunction with multiple self-emissive bezel-less SolidLight Surface Panels that form modular holographic video walls. These SolidLight Surfaces scale to accommodate a wide range of next-generation entertainment, advertising, and commercial applications with an eye towards mass-production in the future to support consumer markets. “

“SolidLight is unlike anything you have experienced before,” said Jon Karafin, CEO of Light Field Lab. “It’s only after you reach out to touch a SolidLight Object that you realize it’s not actually there. SolidLight redefines what is perceived as real, reshaping visual communications, audience engagement and customer experiences forever.”

ProVideo Coalition mentioned the name of Jon Karafin before, when we wrote about the event organized by the Hollywood Section of the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers dedicated to fully immersive virtual reality, back in June 2019. During the event participants had a chance to see a desktop holographic display. Now, Light Field Lab reveals that holographic displays can be the size of huge video walls.

Screens with hundreds of billions of pixels

If you’ve tried Virtual Reality or even Augmented Reality you know the feeling of being tricked by your senses. When I dropped a real controller on the seat besides me on the cockpit of a Cessna, in VR, I fully understood the effect virtual worlds can have on you. But this is completely different, because you do not need a VR headset or any device to experience the illusion, it can be watched by a group of people simultaneously.

As today’s 2D flat panel manufacturers reach a ceiling for scaling display size, resolution and density, Light Field Lab’s technology portfolio capabilities far exceed existing display solutions to power true holographic experiences today. Each 28-inch SolidLight Surface Panel contributes 2.5 billion pixels to the generated holographic object volume and the modular SolidLight Surface can scale to create any size display to accommodate a range of experiences including configurations exceeding hundreds of billions of pixels.

As part of the announcement, Light Field Lab is now accepting applications to pre-order first production SolidLight systems as manufacturing scales into next year. Pre-production systems sold out immediately after the initial 2019 offering and are currently earmarked for holographic experiences that will be deployed in commercial applications over the next one to three years. Pricing varies depending on the size and range of application parameters and is competitive with the latest premium fine pitch video walls. More information about the SolidLight platform, including detailed system specifications is available online.