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Holographic Technology Poised to Reshape Retail, Entertainment, Military and Medial Applications
June 29, 2020
Holographic (often interchangeable with light field) capture and display has piqued the imagination for uses in military mapping, information storage, the medical community, entertainment, fraud and security, art and A/R. Allied Market Research projects the value of the entire display market will reach over $206 billion by 2025, quite a feat when the flat panel industry is now only $110b. “There are a lot of R&D type projects across a lot of different industry verticals,” explains Greenlight Insights founder/chief executive Clifton Dawson. “Industries that currently rely on visualizing 3D assets as part of the critical workflow have been relatively quick to investigate this technology and invest time and resources into it.” Last year saw the debut of the IDEA (Immersive Digital Experiences Alliance) Group, whose mandate is to develop “a family of royalty-free technical specifications that define interoperable interfaces and exchange formats to support the end-to-end conveyance of immersive volumetric and/or light field media.” “With IDEA Group, some of the biggest players are working together,” says Greenlight Insights research manager Alexis Macklin. “It’s an important step to develop infrastructure and agree on terms.” Macklin notes that developers like Light Field Lab “is really an important part of how this field progresses” as well as other IDEA Group members including OTOY, Looking Glass, Visby, Gridraster, Pluto, Charter, Cox and CableLabs. HoloWire talked to experts in the field to get their take on the potential impact of holography on these industry segments.
Retail/fashion: According to a 2019 report from ZenithOptimedia, the retail market will be valued at $27 trillion a year by the end of 2020, with $600+ billion in advertising to influence purchases. Bove’s company specializes in visualization solutions for luxury fashion points to the impact holograms will have on the retail industry as well. “In an effort to jumpstart brick-and-mortar stores, retail is experimenting with things that can happen in store that can’t on your iPad,” he says. “There’s definitely a market for 3D virtual fashion models.” The Modern Mirror, he adds is working on another compelling retail idea: that “through body imaging, you could create a very high-quality 3D model of the individual consumer and see him/her in the virtual clothing.” Because fashion is digitally designed using CAD models, with sub-millimeter accuracy, Bove notes that designers will be able to “just drop in the model and the result really enhances the user experience.” Dawson adds that digital signage and retail are prime environments to take advantage of light field displays. “To be able to contextualize information graphically is something that retailers and cities are interested in investing in also,” he says. COVID-19 has put live runway shows under scrutiny as big events that might not be able to be staged. Light field display, notes Bove, would allow designers to “stage the event in 20 places around the world.” “It’s like being at a [real-life] fashion runway event, with the same models, the same garments,” he says. Lelyveld adds that remote custom fitting of garments is another potential retail use for light field technology … “especially in pandemic times and the need for social distancing.”
Figure 1: DREAMOC XL4
June 29, 2020
Holographic (often interchangeable with light field) capture and display has piqued the imagination for uses in military mapping, information storage, the medical community, entertainment, fraud and security, art and A/R. Allied Market Research projects the value of the entire display market will reach over $206 billion by 2025, quite a feat when the flat panel industry is now only $110b. “There are a lot of R&D type projects across a lot of different industry verticals,” explains Greenlight Insights founder/chief executive Clifton Dawson. “Industries that currently rely on visualizing 3D assets as part of the critical workflow have been relatively quick to investigate this technology and invest time and resources into it.” Last year saw the debut of the IDEA (Immersive Digital Experiences Alliance) Group, whose mandate is to develop “a family of royalty-free technical specifications that define interoperable interfaces and exchange formats to support the end-to-end conveyance of immersive volumetric and/or light field media.” “With IDEA Group, some of the biggest players are working together,” says Greenlight Insights research manager Alexis Macklin. “It’s an important step to develop infrastructure and agree on terms.” Macklin notes that developers like Light Field Lab “is really an important part of how this field progresses” as well as other IDEA Group members including OTOY, Looking Glass, Visby, Gridraster, Pluto, Charter, Cox and CableLabs. HoloWire talked to experts in the field to get their take on the potential impact of holography on these industry segments.
- Philip Lelyveld, USC Entertainment Technology Center Entertainment/Media: This market sector consists of amusement parks at $400 billion in worldwide economic impact (IAAPA); videogames and recorded music at $400+ billion (Futuresource); cinemas at $33 billion (Rentrak) and live music at $10 billion (Statista). He claims that holograms are an organic next step to an on-going evolution in entertainment. “People always want a better experience,” he says. Lelyveld talks about the many uses of light field displays for in-home entertainment. “Bringing the concert to the home is another idea as well as theater in the round,” he says. “It becomes a new art form and creates new language.” Light field imagery “could “be a portal to another place, like looking through a window into another world.” “The only limit is how many people could gather around it,” Lelyveld says. “If you can get the box sized so that several people can watch at once, it would be like the old days of TV. We don’t yet know all the ways it will work but it could be extremely compelling,” he says.
- Pete Ludé,Mission Rock Digital consultant/chief technology officer is IDEA Group chair who believes that out-of-home holographic experiences will be first. “Theme parks can definitely use these enhanced imaging technologies,” Some theme parks already use 3D glasses to see projected images, but ambient light degrades it and 3D glasses don’t work well. An emissive light field display solves all those problems.” She points out that light field capture will also play an important role in producing cinematic quality visual effects production. “As the demand for high quality VFX increases with all the different emerging platforms, something like light field capture can be able to shorten the pipeline,” she says.
- Alexis Macklin, Greenlight Insights research manager believes out-of-home entertainment -- a large scale 3D immersive experience without headsets or glasses – is ripe for development. “It’s already in the early stages, but huge popularity has emerged,” she says. “Light field can make those experiences more realistic, more immersive.”
- V. Michael Bove, co-founder/advisor for The Modern Mirror, Inc., says the videogame industry will benefit from light field displays, and adds “Light field displays will let you create an experience that is shareable with a group of people. If you can provide that user experience without requiring people to wear the hardware, it opens a lot of scenarios.”
Retail/fashion: According to a 2019 report from ZenithOptimedia, the retail market will be valued at $27 trillion a year by the end of 2020, with $600+ billion in advertising to influence purchases. Bove’s company specializes in visualization solutions for luxury fashion points to the impact holograms will have on the retail industry as well. “In an effort to jumpstart brick-and-mortar stores, retail is experimenting with things that can happen in store that can’t on your iPad,” he says. “There’s definitely a market for 3D virtual fashion models.” The Modern Mirror, he adds is working on another compelling retail idea: that “through body imaging, you could create a very high-quality 3D model of the individual consumer and see him/her in the virtual clothing.” Because fashion is digitally designed using CAD models, with sub-millimeter accuracy, Bove notes that designers will be able to “just drop in the model and the result really enhances the user experience.” Dawson adds that digital signage and retail are prime environments to take advantage of light field displays. “To be able to contextualize information graphically is something that retailers and cities are interested in investing in also,” he says. COVID-19 has put live runway shows under scrutiny as big events that might not be able to be staged. Light field display, notes Bove, would allow designers to “stage the event in 20 places around the world.” “It’s like being at a [real-life] fashion runway event, with the same models, the same garments,” he says. Lelyveld adds that remote custom fitting of garments is another potential retail use for light field technology … “especially in pandemic times and the need for social distancing.”
Figure 1: DREAMOC XL4
Energy/Medical/Science: According to Reports and Data, the Visualization and 3D Rendering Software market is expected to grow to $3.7 billion by 2026. These industries need to visualize large amounts of data. Data visualization has relied on a range of visual elements including charts, graphs and maps to create a more accessible way to comprehend patterns, trends and other information. Bove points out that there’s currently “an explosion of high-quality 3D data.” “The content far exceeds our capacity to visualize it. This is going to be a real driver for light field displays. In the early days, molecular modeling, geo-spatial exploration and modeling, cartography couldn’t be seen properly in 2D. Being able to display in 3D is very attractive, and everything that was made better by stereoscopic 3D is made way, way better by light field display.” Dawson highlights that industries that “currently rely on visualizing 3D assets as part of the critical workflow have been relatively quick to investigate [light field] technology and invest time and resources into it, including high-end medical imaging, which are developing ecosystems” says Lelyveld. He said holograms are ideal for team collaboration. “It’s a better technology for delivering visuals for individual and group viewing,” he says. “And holographic displays would be a fundamental improvement over current technologies, extending into remote manipulation for such use cases as micro-surgery or robots in space. “Industrial, medical and military applications need high quality visualization of remote images, and those tend to require high comfort and high accuracy,” he says. “Light field displays are very, very good for that.”
Figure 2: Hologram of the Brain
Figure 2: Hologram of the Brain
Military: For its 2020 budget, Pentagon deputy defense secretary David Norquist reported almost $104 billion for its research, development, test and evaluation (RDT&E) fund, Among their research projects are those focused on light field capture and display. “The Department of Defense has the requirements and the budgets for projects such as 3D modeling of ballistics and landscapes and ordinances,”. “They’re also doing a lot of work on holographic displays for the U.S. Navy on aircraft carriers,” said Lude. In National Defense magazine, Frost & Sullivan vice president of aerospace, defense and security, analyzed the latest in AR and VR headsets for military training and simulation – and imagines a future in which users might not have to rely on any goggles or headsets. “A lot of these things … show a 3D representation of something,” he says. “What if that’s just generated by some sort of video that makes a three-dimensional fixture in front of you that you don’t need glasses for? That’s the interesting thing about the augmented reality is some of those applications, you may not even need glasses for it.” Bove points to the Air Force Research Lab and the Pentagon funding work in light field displays: “With typical 3D stereoscopic displays, there’s the problem of vergence accommodation conflict (VAC) , caused by the conflicting depth cues and resulting in discomfort and fatigue,” he explains. “Light field displays don’t have that problem.” Light field capture opens the door to a new kind of storytelling, adding more options to creative expression. “It will become an artistic judgment, where the appropriate content migrates to the appropriate display platform,” Ludé says. “We’ll end up with new experiences that we can’t predict now and find out which experiences turn out to be valuable.”
Futurotec Solutions LLP based out of Ahmedabad, India brings a breakthrough innovation in AR segment with introduction of 3D Hologram Table which displays Interactive 360 degree Holograms of objects with multi-user support. The objects can be displayed up to 70 cm. in height and 1 meter in depth.
Google has an effort in holographic technology that lets the viewer change their perspective and even look around objects in frame using 46 spare cameras to sync together using “light field technology”. The new technique, due to be presented at SIGGRAPH, uses footage from dozens of cameras shooting simultaneously, forming a sort of giant compound eye. These many perspectives are merged into a single one in which the viewer can move their viewpoint and the scene will react correspondingly in real time.
Figure 3: Image Showing How The Cameras Capture And Segment The View
Futurotec Solutions LLP based out of Ahmedabad, India brings a breakthrough innovation in AR segment with introduction of 3D Hologram Table which displays Interactive 360 degree Holograms of objects with multi-user support. The objects can be displayed up to 70 cm. in height and 1 meter in depth.
- 3D HOLOGRAM TABLE - Unique Features
- World’s first Multi-user, Multi-Color, Interactive & IoT integrated Hologram Table.
- Projection of Holograms up to 70cms high and 1meter deep. Projection Area of 1.2m square with external screen for larger audiences.
- Easy to use controls like 3D Crystal Lens Glasses and Holographic Control Wand.
- 4 people can get experience of complete 360-degree view.
- Support all major 3D formats including existing CAD/ 3DS models and animations.
- Programmable Interfaces and Interactivity Possible
- Gigabytes of point cloud data in fraction of seconds.
- REAL ESTATE - USE CASE -- Real Estate could use technology to display immersive 3D experience of their large projects using state of the art 3D Hologram Technology for rendering on 3D Hologram Table. Following unique features will make the experience truly immersive:
- Complete 3D aerial view of real estate project with zoom in and zoom out to minutest details.
- Showcasing the key area near to project locations.
- 3D sample floor plan for residential/commercial area rendered on 3D Hologram Table.
- Showcasing important amenities available in the real estate area by displaying 3D Models with bookmark features.
- Animation of entry and parking area of the project.
- Day & Night view of the area surrounding the Real Estate project can be shown using unique torch feature on 3D Hologram Table.
- Measurable distance of nearby locations can be shown on 3D Hologram Table.
- Bookmarks of key locations of Real Estate project can be programmed for microscopic view of each
location.
Google has an effort in holographic technology that lets the viewer change their perspective and even look around objects in frame using 46 spare cameras to sync together using “light field technology”. The new technique, due to be presented at SIGGRAPH, uses footage from dozens of cameras shooting simultaneously, forming a sort of giant compound eye. These many perspectives are merged into a single one in which the viewer can move their viewpoint and the scene will react correspondingly in real time.
Figure 3: Image Showing How The Cameras Capture And Segment The View
Existing VR-enhanced video generally uses fairly ordinary stereoscopic 3D, which doesn’t allow for a change in viewpoint. Facebook’s method of understanding depth in photos and adding perspective is far more limited, creating only a small shift in perspective. In Google’s videos, a movement of the by a foot to the side to peek around a corner or see the other side of a given object results in photorealistic and full motion but in fact rendered in 3D, so even slight changes to the viewpoint are accurately reflected.
Since the rig is wide, parts of the scene that are hidden from one perspective are visible from others. Swing from the far right side to the far left and zoom in, can show entirely new features — eerily reminiscent of the infamous “enhance” scene from “Blade Runner. ”The experiment is a close cousin to the LED egg used for volumetric capture of human motion demonstrated late last year. Google’s AI division is interested in enriching media, though how they’ll do it in a Pixel smartphone rather than a car-sized camera array is anyone’s guess. Examples of the videos may be viewed at: https://augmentedperception.github.io/deepviewvideo/
Since the rig is wide, parts of the scene that are hidden from one perspective are visible from others. Swing from the far right side to the far left and zoom in, can show entirely new features — eerily reminiscent of the infamous “enhance” scene from “Blade Runner. ”The experiment is a close cousin to the LED egg used for volumetric capture of human motion demonstrated late last year. Google’s AI division is interested in enriching media, though how they’ll do it in a Pixel smartphone rather than a car-sized camera array is anyone’s guess. Examples of the videos may be viewed at: https://augmentedperception.github.io/deepviewvideo/