Light Field Lab, a Silicon Valley startup, has presented the first "real" holograms to the world, and the company plans to target many sectors including industry and entertainment. The potential of holograms for real-world applications has been pulling companies like Samsung on a chase for the “holy hologram grail display” with little success.

Holograms have dominated science fiction movies and haunted innovators for decades. However, until now, no one had created real holograms on a scale that made them useful for any real-world application. Most of the holograms the world has seen are nothing but tricks and effects that use confined spaces, mirrors, VR and AR headsets, or autostereoscopic glasses. But, Light Field Lab’s holograms are no elaborate trick; they are the real deal.

Light Field Lab presented the first real high-resolution hologram made up of solid light. It conjures digital objects from thin air and can fill a room, and the technology requires no special headset or gadgets. Today the startup is taking orders for different-sized solid light panels online. The company has done its homework and plans to launch a marketing push within the next few years. Their vision to build “a solid light holographic future” is one where “digital content escapes the screen and merges with reality," or at least that's the idea.

How It Works And Pixels For Dollars


The company’s technology is capable of controlling light, emitting photons, and re-ordering them to create images, even though the object itself isn't there. “You don’t see in the real world that wing of the bird,” the CEO Karafin explains, “You see it because those photons interact with the wing of the bird." The technology projects dimensional wavefronts not to form an object but to send light to your eyes in a way that mimics how human vision works in with real objects, ultimately ending in an electric impulse of information in our brain. To get this complex natural replication process to work the company uses trademark technology, high-performance electronics, display controllers, photonics arrays with nanoparticle polymer fused surface energy relays, and phase guide modulation surfaces. It's a lot of very fancy equipment and complicated gadgetry, but the end result is something akin to what we see from holograms in science fiction.

Light Field Lab is taking orders for 90, 120, and 150-inch displays, and custom-made panels. A 28-inch panel has an insane resolution of 2.5 billion pixels. Today their largest panel sells for a couple of millions of dollars but they are confident that their prices will drop fast. They explain that there is a steady decline in the dollar-pixel-time relationship when it comes to displays and that 8K will soon phase out (despite it not even really being "here" yet) leaving the door open for holograms. “It has been thought of as the holy grail of displays. It has been thought of as impossible,” the company says. They expect holograms to soon be common across the world, in entertainment venues, theme parks, cinema, streets, TVs and mobile devices says. At those prices, it's not likely, but the future may bring much more affordable versions.