Sci-Fi fantasy or Engineering Reality?

Holographic technologies have been fantasied and theorised about over the past half century. The scientific community and sci-fi fans know that the best way to make true 3D images is by using holographic technology. However, this has proved to be a very difficult technical challenge to realise in practice, from a manufacturing, computation and bandwidth perspective.

A hologram is a 2D surface that can scatter light, using the physical principles of diffraction, to form 3D shapes both in front of and behind this surface. Diffraction occurs when light is scattered by objects that are about the same size as the light itself - around 500 nanometres.

Instead of trying to create a mythical "Star Wars" display, Holoxica took a more pragmatic approach by asking "what is the simplest holographic display we can make?". The answer: a single pixel, or voxel, in 3D space, that can be switched on or off. One voxel is not particularly interesting, so we move on to two voxels and worked up from there to 4 to 9 to 16 voxels and so on. We are now at several million voxels. Holoxica's bottom-up approach is scalable and can be realised with currently available commodity technologies.