Interactive holographic technology

Interactive HUD-style holographic display

Holoxica announces an Interactive Holographic 3D Display, which is a second generation prototype. The design is inspired by Head-Up Displays (HUDs), based on free-space optics with images floating in mid-air that can change in real-time. A paper on this HUD-style display was presented at the SPIE (International Photonics Society) Photonics West Conference in February 2013, and it is published in the conference proceedings.

The interactive holographic display system comprises a Holographic Optical Element (HOE) lens, a digital controller, a motion sensor and a projection subsystem (a laser projector) imaging a diffusion screen. The HOE is about the size of a page (20x30cm) and the images are formed in real space (in mid-air) about 20cm from the hologram plane. The image are about the size of a hand (up to 7x7cm). The images can be refreshed at video rates and arbitrary images can be displayed. However, the images are formed in three distinct planes, corresponding to the colours of the lasers in the laser projector i.e. red, green and blue.

The display includes a Kinect motion sensor to enable interactivity with a number of apps that we have written for it. The viewer can ‘touch’ icons in space and do things like draw in mid-air. We have about ten apps at the moment including mid-air drawing, pong-style game, counter, keypad, viewing image sequences .. etc.

Immediate applications of this technology include HUD-style displays and novel user-interfaces with the added dimensions of real-space interactivity.

This display is an improvement over our first generation demo, which had a fixed number of images embedded in the holographic screen. The holographic images could be replayed in real space (mid-air) in real-time, in any sequence. However, this display was not able to display arbitrary images and there were limits to its scalability.

This display was featured on The Gadget Show, FutureTech Edition, broadcast on 25th Mar 2013 (Channel 5, UK), with over a million viewers.