Holograms, floating like 3D images in thin air, will soon turn into a reality as the next big feature in smartphones of the future, with a Californian company already working on miniature projectors for nine years.
Ostendo Technologies has come up with 5,000ppi projectors in the “size of Tic Tacs, powered by a computer chip that can control the colour, brightness and angle of each beam of light across one million pixels,” to be introduced into smartphones by the first half of 2015.
The Wall Street Journal reported that the company showcased the holographic projector prototype, a set of six chips displaying a floating 3D dice, like a real solid object. Ostendo has generated $90 million in venture-capitalist funding, apart from $38 million in government research contracts, including the military R&D organisation DARPA.
“Display is the last frontier,” said Ostendo’s chief executive and founder, Dr Hussein El-Ghoroury. “Over the years, processing power has improved and networks have more bandwidth, but what is missing is comparable advancement in display. Imagine if everything coming back to you was in 3D – all of your shopping, all of your gaming, every way you retrieve data.”
Dr. El-Ghoroury noted that 3D technology is still in the early stages of development and needs to improve. The company is also “aiming to make the pixels even smaller to achieve higher resolution.”
Ostendo is planning to start shipping the first iteration of the chip by summer 2015, capable of projecting a 48-inch 2D video onto any flat surface, while the second chip that will project 3D images will enter production just months after the first.