<i>“Everybody wants to put 3-D on a smartphone”</i><p>Question is whether people will want to <i>use</i> 3-D on a smartphone. We may be hitting a saturation point where current generation(s) have absorbed enough change, and we may have to wait for the next generation, growing up with "a Cray 2 in your pocket" to be ready for the next big step.
Video on this page: <a href="http://spectrum.ieee.org/consumer-electronics/audiovideo/glassesfree-3d-from-almost-any-angle" rel="nofollow">http://spectrum.ieee.org/consumer-electronics/audiovideo/gla...</a>
Why? The screens are too small and the resolution is likely to be poor; plus you can only interact with a finger on a 2D surface. 3D in space gestures in such a small area are way too inexact and subject to false recognition.
I might be nitpicking, but it seems worn to call this holographic. It <i>is</i> 3d, but it's like an improved lenticular process; it has <i>many</i> views, but they're discrete not continuous, and they don't float above the display.
I believe the correct solution is to have coherent light emitted from very small pixels, with the ability to modulate either the phase or amplitude of each pixel. This will give the appearance of a regular film hologram. Color is of course another challenge, but this approach seems more practical than tiny lenses producing a finite number of directions. OTOH the old CRT shadow mask was a marvel in its day and was quite practical.<p>Ultimately we DO want glasses. A single holograpic display per eye would be fine and would allow looking around by moving your eyeballs instead of your head in a VR context. This could be a couple of square inches (or less) of hologram per eye.
This is undoubtedly cool technology, but before anyone gets <i>too</i> excited about holograms floating in space, understand that this is not some sort of breakthrough into the volumetric 3D displays you see in sci-fi movies: You still have to be looking directly into the screen to see the image, just like how a traditional hologram can't escape the boundaries of its frame.
Lightfield displays in glasses will be revolutionary for augmented reality, but I don't see the resolution or computation problems being solved anytime soon. I'll have to research Ostendo and Leia, however.
This technology will be DOA if AR glasses take off at the same time - the latter could be used as displays for any device, not only the smartphone in your pocket.