Light Field Lab launches SolidLight holographic imaging systems

Light field laboratory has launched its SolidLight holographic and volumetric display technologies that will power some stunning images of the future.

These next-generation display technologies will be used by major companies to create a wide variety of holographic images and animations. By connecting a group 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 goes. The San Jose, California-based company gave me a theater tour of an animated demo of an alien it built in collaboration with the SETI Institute, the organization searching for extraterrestrial intelligence in our galaxy.

“We are offering it to our customers and will roll it out next year,” said Jon Karafin, CEO of Light Field Lab, in our latest interview. “It’s really exciting. This is an example of the type of entertainment people will use.”

The demo took me inside the company’s headquarters, in a sort of fake secret government facility in Area 51. Taking me into a secret meeting room behind a fake bookcase, a woman in a lab coat briefed me on the project, that it had something to do with alien encounters. He took me to an elevator where he simulated taking me underground to a research space free of radio interference.

There was a mad scientist there and an army general who was quite paranoid about my presence. They then demoed SolidLight’s ability to form holographic objects in mid-air. The floating multiplanar objects were formed with a display power of 100 million pixels per square meter.

Then the researcher opened a portal to another planet, where an alien spoke to me. It seemed real enough and asked me questions. Then he handed me a secret cube and everyone in the room freaked out. The black cube seemed to be floating in mid-air. It was a holographic animation. This 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 demo, available by invitation only, 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 have created a themed environment that allows guests to suspend disbelief and interact with an extraterrestrial formed only with light,” said Jon Karafin, CEO of Light Field Lab.

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

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

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

How the technology works

Light Field Lab had to assemble the holographic images on the display from smaller submodules capable of producing the hologram. By stitching many modules together, it can generate images with 10 billion pixels per square meter, or with fewer modules it can create images with lower resolution.

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 we ultimately see as the world around us are beams of light that focus in the back of our eyes. The trick is to get your eyes to focus on a particular point in space.

Light Field Lab’s technology recreates what optical physics calls a “real image” for objects projected off-screen by generating a huge number of viewing angles that change correctly with viewpoint and position, just like in the real world. This is achieved with a directly emissive, modular, flat-panel display surface coupled with a complex array 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 eyes focus freely on objects formed in mid-air. The result is that the brain says “this is real” without having any physical object. In other words, Light Field Lab creates actual holograms without headgear.

There is no head tracking, no motion sickness and no latency in the display. To create the alien, the team used a combination of Unreal Engine technology and Maya tools. The variety of experiences can include virtual concierge services where artificial intelligence can answer questions at a sort of front desk. Digital signage is another possible market. But it requires a lot of graphics processing units (GPUs) and AI data center technology. A configuration could use more than 60 GPUs.

Light Field Lab technologies combine size, resolution and density to project SolidLight objects that move, refract and reflect accurately in physical space.

Directly emissive modular SolidLight surfaces form dense converging wavefronts with billions of pixels of photonic resolution. Without equipment constraints, SolidLight allows viewers to see digital objects in the physical world that escape the screen and are indistinguishable from reality. OK, you can distinguish them as they are now, but in the future the technology will improve. I’ve already seen it improve since 2018. Back then the display showed a small butterfly. He was later fed to a chameleon and then to the talking head of an Aztec. Now it can formulate images in the space of one square meter.

The company was founded in 2017 by Karafin, Brendan Bevensee and Ed Ibe, with the sole mission of enabling a holographic future by building on the founders’ collective experience in innovating light field technology. The team had experience working at capturing light fields and creating displays Liter in the past. It has a core investor group and a growing number of customers.

In 2025, lower bandwidth models will likely hit the market, and more ambitious designs will hit the market within three to five years.