RED’s Hydrogen phone has a holographic display, and here’s how it works
RED is coming to market with quite the compelling phone. Their RED Hydrogen could pass as a great smartphone on all the usual merits by which we judge then, but its display is said to be holographic in nature.
Today, the company revealed more details about how it works. The phone projects a light field which can depict 3D shapes in a space raised above the display due to nanotechnology embedded within the display. This allows them to offer a unique feature while still providing typical display performance.
The tech comes from a company called Leia Inc, who signed a multi-year deal with RED to make this happen.
Leia leverages recent breakthroughs in Nano-Photonic design and manufacturing to provide a complete lightfield “holographic” display solution for mobile devices, through proprietary hardware and software. The Silicon Valley firm commercializes LCD-based mobile screens able to synthesize lightfield holographic content while preserving the normal operation of the display.
If that’s not enough, they also have licenses for Synaptic technology for hover gestures to interact with holographic content. Think waving your hand to move through a 3D map that’s being projected holographically. It sounds like the sort of stuff out of an alien flick, although it probably won’t be quite as mature as it would appear there.
With the technology being proven, RED’s next hurdle will be to convince you to pay over $1,000 for it, which is what this phone is said to cost once it hits retail. We’re sure they’re working on some killer apps to help sell it as a valuable technological tool more than a novelty, though that didn’t exactly help, say, the stereoscopic 3D smartphones of years past. We’ll have to wait and see if this can go any further. You can watch a concept of what Leia is working on in the video above.