Clearly our society has a need for holograms, whether it’s Princess Leia appealing to Obi Wan or an audience delighting in the resurrection of Tupac. A Carlsbad-based company is taking full-advantage of this national demand and is currently creating a way for anyone to project a hologram from their smartphones.
Ostendo Technologies has invented the Ostengo Quantum Photonic Imager. It’s a hologram projector chip that is the size of a tiny pill. Crammed in the tiny device is an image processor and a bunch of LEDs adding up to a million individual beams of light. The imager would be able to control the color, brightness and angle of the image being projected.
Ideally, you would install the imager in your phone and bam! You could project a hologram on the same device you use to play Candy Crush Saga. R2-D2 isn’t even capable of that!
Ostengo employees gave a demonstration of the device recently. They put six units together and were able to project a 3-D image of green dice, circling in the air.
“The image and motion appeared consistent, irrespective of the position of the viewer,” stated a ‘Wall Street Journal’ report.
Ostengo was pretty unclear how they were able to get a free-floating image of dice in the air. Typically, as in the virtual Tupac performance, a 2-D projection surface is required. However, I think we can all assume Ostengo’s secret: black magic.
Ostengo managed to get $90 million in funding from venture-capital firms and $38 million from government contracts. With this kind of cash, employees from Ostengo plan to continue their research for the next ten years. In fact, I bet they could create holograms of holograms researching hologram-technology.
Ostengo projected that the first of these smartphone hologram devices will be manufactured next year. There’s no information has to how much these devices will cost, but who are we kidding? Of course we’ll be purchasing one!
Source: News.Discovery.com
