Slim-Panel Holographic Display For Smartphones

Samsung has claimed to have overcome the difficulties in making holographic displays possible with their new slim-panel holographic video display that can be viewed from various angles.

The scientists from Samsung described their new technology in their paper published in the journal Nature Communications. They also plan to make it accessible with the smartphone in the future as well as in household and office devices.

Holographic video displays have been featured in numerous science fiction books and movies in the past decades, but the 3D holographic video players are still not available to the public. Existing players are too bulky, and it has limited views when viewed from different angles.

Holographic video displays vs Conventional 3D displays

Holograms are created by laser beams that encode the image onto a recording medium like a film or plate. Rather than illuminating the image through the lens, holograms are a photographic recording of a light field.

Scientists can produce holographic video displays by sending coherent light from lasers through a spatial light modulator that can manipulate the features of the light waves. Holographic video displays can create realistic 3D images, unlike conventional 3D displays. However, making holographic video displays are not an easy feat.

IEEE Spectrum reported that one reason for that is holographic video displays are limited by pixel size and number, which often limits them to small images or narrow viewing angles. Earlier holographic displays can only have a full high-definition resolution at a viewing angle of 0.25 degrees in a 10-inch display or 30 degrees for a 0.1-inch display.

Secondly, generating the coherent light display to produce a holographic video display is also challenging. Often, it requires complex and bulky optics which is hard to make holograms with slim flat-panel displays. Additionally, holographic videos need a huge amount of computing power to accommodate their extraordinary amount of data.

But it seems that Samsung has already surpassed these concerns as they have developed a way to create thin holographic video displays that can be viewed from various angles.

Hong-Seok Lee, an optical engineer at Samsung and the senior study author, said that they are confident that they can make the holographic displays a product of the future.

Samsung's slim-panel holographic display

According to Techxplore, Samsung's 25 cm tall holographic demo device was created by adding a steering-backlight unit and a beam deflector to increase viewing angles which has a viewing angle of 15 degrees within a meter distance.

The viewing angle is even increased by 30 times than the convention holograms because of the beam deflector. that could bend the light that passes through it like a prism due to the sandwiched liquid crystals between the sheets of glass.

The slim-panel holographic video display allows a slim form of up to 1 cm thick. It has a light modulator, geometric lens, and holographic video processor that can carry out 140 billion operations per second.

Samsung researchers have used a new algorithm that uses lookup tables to process the video data that enables the demo device to display a 4K resolution holographic video display that runs 30 frames per second.

Samsung has posted a demo video of the device on Youtube and has acknowledged that more work is still required for their device to be commercially distributed. They are planning to change the configuration that will suit a smartphone, and also to home and office devices.