During a famous scene in Star Wars, Princess Leia has R2D2 play a holographic video message in midair in which she pleads for help from Obi-Wan Kenobi. In the near future, smartphones and other mobile devices will have the ability to show something quite similar, according to David Fattal.
Fattal’s company, appropriately named Leia, will demonstrate a prototype of its new 3-D display next week at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. Later this year it plans to release a small display module capable of producing full-color 3-D images and videos that are visible—with no special glasses—from 64 different viewpoints.
Key to Leia’s technology is an invention by Fattal that takes advantage of advances in the ability to control the paths light takes at the nanoscale. He first revealed the concept, which Leia calls a “multiview backlight,” in a Nature paper published two years ago (see “35 Innovators Under 35: David Fattal”). At the time, Fattal was a researcher at HP Labs and his work applied to optical interconnects, which allow computers to exchange information encoded in light. But he realized that the idea could also be used to display holographic images, and he left Hewlett-Packard to pursue that idea.
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