It Won’t Be Long Until Your Smartphone Will Be Capable Of Running Holograms

For those of us who sat stunned at our first viewing of Star Wars all of those decades ago, holding our breath as Princess Leia stored that message that later appeared as a hologram, this is a surreal moment.

Now, it won’t be long until we all hold a capability just like that one on a device that fits in our palm.

It’s been more than 50 years since Dennis Gabor first devised using wavefront interference to reconstruct images in three dimensions, but I doubt anyone back them could have imagined we could run them on something as small as a smartphone.

Two years ago, MIT researchers made a breakthrough in what they dubbed “tensor holography,” and today, they say the system is “full automatic, robust to rendered and misaligned real-world inputs, produces realistic depth boundaries, and correct vision aberrations.”

Project co-author Wokciech Matusik can’t help but brag.

“We are amazed at how well it performs, and it’s economical, too: the amount of computer power and memory required for this real-time 3D holography is less than one megabyte. It’s a negligible amount, considering the tens and hundreds of gigabytes available on the latest cell phone.”

Computers have made the process of splitting a laser beam in two infinitely easier, explains study lead Liang Shi.

Image Credit: Nature

“Because each point in the scene has a different depth, you can’t apply the same operations for all of them. That increases the complexity significantly.”

So, the team built a convolutional neural network and set it to match up 4,000 pairs of computer0-generated images – one was a 2D picture containing information on the color and depth of each pixel and the other a matching hologram.

The result was a program so good it surprised even the team who created it.

“It’s a considerable leap that could completely change people’s attitudes toward holography. We feel like neural networks were born for this task.”

Other applications include 3D printing, medical visualizations, microscopy, and materials science – and plenty of people think holographic 3D might elbow out virtual reality in popularity, too.

Image Credit: Nature

“Holographic 3D displays provide differentiating interactive experiences from cell phones or stereoscopic augmented reality and VR displays. Our work runs in real-time on a consumer-grade GPU (graphics processing unit) and 5 FPS (frames per second) on an iPhone 13 Pro…promising real-time mobile performance in future-generation AR/VR headsets and glasses.”

You never can tell what’s going to be the next big thing, but I, for one, would definitely like to give this a shot.