Light Field Lab launches SolidLight holographic imagery systems

Light Field Lab has launched its SolidLight Holographic and Volumetric display technologies that will power some amazing imagery of the future.

These next-generation display technologies will be used by major companies to build a wide variety of holographic images and animations. Connecting a bunch of panels together, the system can modulate 10 billion pixels per square meter.

Last year, Light Field Lab raised $50 million, adding to its war chest of $85 million raised since its inception. And now I can see where that money is going. The San Jose, California-based company gave me a theatrical tour of an animated demo of an alien that it builds in collaboration with the SETI Institute, the organization searching for extraterrestrial intelligence in our galaxy.

“We’re offering this to our customers and are deploying next year,” said Jon Karafin, CEO of Light Field Lab, in our latest interview. “That’s pretty exciting. This is an example of the kind of entertainment people are going to deploy.”

The demo took me inside the company’s headquarters in a kind of faux Area 51 secrete government facility. Taking me to a secret briefing room behind a fake bookcase, a woman in a lab coat filled me in on the project, which had something to do with alien encounters. She took me to an elevator where it simulated taking me deep underground into a research space that was free of radio interference.

There was a mad scientist there and an army general who was quite paranoid about my presence. They then showed off the demo of SolidLight’s ability to form holographic objects in midair. The floating multi-planar objects were formed with 100 million pixels square meter of display power.

So the researcher opened a portal to another planet, where an alien talked to me. It looked pretty real and asked me questions. Then it handed me a secret cube, and everyone in the room freaked out. The black cube appeared to be floating in mid-air. It was a holographic animation. That means it was a 3D object, as I could move my head and see different parts of the cube. I felt like I could reach out and grab that box.

Ready for the market

The invitation-only demo has entertained thought leaders from a wide variety of industries, including media, technology, retail and tourism. Light Field Lab hopes to sell them all its technology.

“SETI and Light Field Lab created a themed environment enabling guests to suspend disbelief and engage with an extraterrestrial formed with nothing but light,” said Jon Karafin, CEO of Light Field Lab.

The SETI Institute emerged as the ideal partner to introduce the possibilities of SolidLight. SETI leverages advanced technologies and immense bandwidth to capture and analyze radio signals, while LFL builds advanced display technology that incorporates incredible resolution and compute to enable holographic and volumetric objects that escape the screen and merge with reality.

“The SETI Institute has partnered with Light Field Lab to enable an incredibly immersive experience and launch the company’s extraordinary SolidLight technologies. These are next-level, next-generation displays that are clearly the precursor to Star Trek’s Holodeck,” said Bill Diamond, president and CEO of the SETI Institute, in a statement.

SolidLight: Holographic installations will be built-to-order based upon customer requirements and powered with an array of media servers to form fully holographic objects. SolidLight: Volumetric systems are available now with delivery in 2025 and driven with a single computer to form multiple planes within the holographic volume.

How the tech works

Light Field Lab had to assembles the holographic images on the display from smaller submodules that can produce the hologram. By pushing a lot of modules together, it can generate images with 10 billion pixels per square meter, or with fewer modules it can make smaller resolution images.

As I wrote before, a hologram is the recording and projection of light.

Everything around us is a collection of light energy visible through our eyes and processed by the visual cortex of the brain. The “light field” defines how photons travel through space and interact with material surfaces. The things that we ultimately see as the world around us are bundles of light that focus at the back of our eyes. The trick is getting your eyes to focus on a particular point in space.

Light Field Lab’s technology re-creates what optical physics calls a “real image” for off-screen projected objects by generating a massive number of viewing angles that correctly change with the point of view and location just like in the real world. This is accomplished with a directly emissive, modular, and flat-panel display surface coupled with a complex series of waveguides that modulate the dense field of collimated light rays. With this implementation, a viewer sees around objects when moving in any direction such that motion parallax is maintained, reflections and refractions behave correctly, and the eyes freely focus on the items formed in mid-air. The result is that the brain says, “this is real,” without having any physical objects. In other words, Light Field Lab creates real holograms with no headgear.

There’s no head-tracking, no motion sickness, and no latency in the display. To create the alien, the team used a combination of Unreal Engine tech and Maya tools. The variety of experiences can include virtual concierge services where AI can answer questions at a kind of reception desk. Digital signage is another possible market. But it takes a lot of graphics processing units (GPUs) and AI data center technology. One configuration might use more than 60 GPUs.

Light Field Lab’s technologies combine 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 see digital objects in the physical world that escape the screen and are indistinguishable from reality. OK, you can distinguish as they are now, but in the future, the tech will get better. I’ve already seen it get better since 2018. Back then, the display produced a small butterfly. Later, it was beefed to a chameleon and then an Aztec’s talking head. Now it can formulate imagery in the space of a square meter.

The company was founded in 2017 by Karafin, Brendan Bevensee, and Ed Ibe, with the single mission to enable a holographic future by building upon the founders’ collective expertise of light field technology innovation. The team had experience working at light field capture and display maker Lytro in the past. It has a bunch of marquee investors and an increasing number of customers.

In 2025, lower-bandwidth models will likely hit the market, and more ambitious projects will reach the market in three to five years.