New SolidLight Panels Produce Hi-Res, Interactive Holograms

This week, Light Field Lab unveiled SolidLight™, a high resolution holographic display platform that can display project solid light objects that accurately move, refract, and reflect in physical space.

Check out a SolidLight chameleon here:

Live Design talked to Jon Karafin, CEO and co-founder of Light Field Lab about the potential applications of the holographic screens.

Live Design: How large can a SolidLight Surface screen be?

Jon Karafin: Each SolidLight Surface panel is a bezel-less, 28-inch holographic building block providing for potentially infinite resolution, modularity and scale. Each SolidLight Surface panel projects 2.5 billion pixels with an effective density of 10 billion pixels per square meter. For example, a 90-inch diagonal SolidLight Surface includes eight panels and projects 20 billion pixels whereas a 178-inch SolidLight Surface includes 32 panels and projects 80 billion pixels.

LD: Where do you see the panels being installed?

JK: Similar to other fine pitch video walls, SolidLight Surfaces can be seamlessly tiled with other panels and linearly scale to meet any size requirement with the ultimate goal of forming floors, ceilings and walls for marquee installations.

LD: How robust are they? Are they designed to withstand a tour or do they need to be part of a static installation in a protected environment?

JK: Initially, SolidLight Surfaces are intended for indoor marquee installations analogous to fine pitch video walls across commercial applications, such as entertainment, corporate, public venues, and more. SolidLight is configured as a turnkey hardware and software system designed to ensure transformational experiences regardless of the scale and scope of applications. The system includes modular SolidLight Surface panels; computational hardware including servers, GPUs, synchronization, and networking; real-time and offline WaveTracer rendering software and plugins to support existing workflows; and support and maintenance.

Lightfield Lab founders, from left: Edwin Ibe, EVP, engineering & co-founder; Brendan Bevensee, CTO & co-founder; Jon Karafin, CEO & co-founder

LD: What kind of applications are you expecting clients to use the panels for?

JK: Initially, Light Field Lab is building SolidLight Surfaces for applications across the commercial video wall market for media/entertainment, advertising, corporate/enterprise, public spaces, and venues as well as other fine pitch video wall locations and applications. Light Field Lab anticipates SolidLight Surfaces market growth into additional applications in the future, including digital signage, automotive, industrial, professional, transportation, hospitality, medical, government, control rooms, retail, broadcast, gaming, production, and other display markets.

LD: How do the holograms render on camera? Could they be used for both a live audience and a streaming show?

JK: A SolidLight Object may be photographed just like a real object supporting true focus and depth of field to precisely integrate with the real world. The SolidLight WaveTracer additionally enables real-time and interactive holographic content creation.

LD: How is content created for these screens? Can designers create something in a different software and then run it through Wave Tracer or do images have to be created in your proprietary software?

JK: SolidLight provides content creators with an entirely new creative environment, bound only by the limits of their imagination. The ability to create virtualized physical objects that come off the screen will allow professional storytellers, special effects artists, advertising and corporate communications professionals, and myriad other creative people and businesses to reinvent communications as we know it today.

SolidLight software and plug-ins directly integrate into existing production workflows to enhance existing tool sets. SolidLight content may be created with any 3D scene in real-time, rendered offline or may leverage existing volumetric capture workflows and integrate with 2D converted assets. Content may be generated with existing software tool sets and projected in real-time with Light Field Lab’s SolidLight WaveTracer to limit the need for content storage.

SolidLight™ from Light Field Lab

LD: What does realtime interactive mean in this context? If there is a hologram cat, can I pet it?

JK: Yes, real-time interactivity is possible. Light Field Lab’s proprietary WaveTracer hardware and software allows for characters to be projected in real-time. Any interactivity you can accomplish in 2D can now also be fulfilled with a SolidLight hologram. For example, reaching out to pet a cat may prompt a purr in response or tilting its head to lean into the pet.

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