Back in August 2021, LA-based Portl launched a 7-ft-tall hologram projection box for life-like remote communications. Now renamed Proto, the company has revealed that its Epic technology is allowing cancer patients to consult life-size virtual specialists.

Proto was founded in 2018 by David Nussbaum, who took his experience working on huge holograms for arena gigs, movie premieres and fashion shows to produce a hologram in a box called the Epic. The idea is to plonk the machine in a venue, university, boardroom, medical facility and so on, and allow folks to chat with a life-like 3D hologram of a person who might be thousands of miles away.

So instead of a tiny image on a smartphone screen, the viewer essentially gets to interact with someone as if they’re actually in the room for a more natural communications experience. LED lighting inside the box helps with shadows and reflections for added realism, the front of the unit is touch-enabled, microphones and speakers are cooked in, and there are AI-powered cameras onboard too.

Researchers have developed a new smartphone-based digital holographic microscope that enables precision 3D measurements. The highly portable and inexpensive microscope could help bring 3D measurement capabilities to a broader range of applications, including educational uses and point-of-care diagnostics in resource-limited settings.

Entangled particles of light can transmit holographic images that can be selectively erased, allowing for secure communications that can also be deleted.

By Karmela Padavic-Callaghan

An article in Opto-Electronic Advances, discusses complete-basis-reprogrammable coding metasurface for generating dynamically-controlled holograms under arbitrary polarization states.

Voyager’s EMH is coming soon.

New “metaholograms” could transform AR/VR technologies by enabling crosstalk-free, high-fidelity image projection with vastly increased information capacity.

Researchers have developed a new type of holograms, known as “metaholograms,” capable of projecting multiple high-fidelity images free of crosstalk. This innovation opens doors to advanced applications in virtual and augmented reality (AR/VR) displays, data storage, and image encryption.

Metaholograms offer several advantages over traditional holograms, including broader operational bandwidth, higher imaging resolution, wider viewing angle, and more compact size. However, a major challenge for metaholograms has been their limited information capacity which only allows them to project a few independent images. Existing methods typically can provide a small number of display channels and often suffer from inter-channel crosstalk during image projections.

This innovation has the potential to significantly improve AR/VR displays by enabling the projection of more complex and realistic scenes. It also holds promise for applications in image encryption, where the information is encoded into multiple holographic channels for enhanced security.

The research is a significant step forward in developing high-performance metaholograms with a vastly increased information capacity. This study paves the way for exciting new possibilities in various fields, from advanced displays to information encryption and information storage.

Close friend and coworker Thomas Hertog explores the groundbreaking physicist’s theories regarding the Big Bang’s beginnings on this, the sixth anniversary of Stephen Hawking’s passing.

I was appointed as Stephen Hawking’s PhD student in 1998 “to work on a quantum theory of the Big Bang.” Over the course of about 20 years, what began as a doctoral project evolved into a close collaboration that came to an end only six years ago, on March 14, 2018, when he passed away.

The mystery that drove our investigation during this time was how the Big Bang could have produced conditions that were so ideal for life. How should we interpret this enigmatic display of intent?

Engineers at Stanford University have successfully combined AI and holographic imagery to develop the augmented reality headset of the future.