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So, here’s the scoop. Researchers over at Meta Reality Labs and Stanford—yep, those brainy folks—have pulled out something pretty wild. They’ve got this new holographic display, right? And it fits in glasses about as thick as your average specs. Kinda mind-blowing if you ask me.
I stumbled across this paper in Nature Photonics and had to rub my eyes to make sure I wasn’t seeing things. Stanford’s electrical engineering whiz, Gordon Wetzstein, plus some other geniuses from Meta and Stanford, are behind it. They’ve mashed up really thin waveguide holography with, wait for it, AI stuff that spins out super-real 3D visuals. Sounds futuristic? Maybe it is.
Anyway, here’s the kicker: these optics aren’t see-through like what you find on the HoloLens 2 or Magic Leap One. There’s a reason they call it mixed reality, and not just plain old augmented reality.
The tech itself? It’s only 3 millimeters thick. That’s like stacking a few pennies, right? It’s got this cool custom waveguide and something called a Spatial Light Modulator, which apparently messes with light at each tiny bit to splash full-res 3D holograms right into your eyeballs.
Oh, and about those traditional XR headsets? You know, the ones that try hard to fake depth with flat images? This new thing, it’s leagues ahead. It pumps out genuine holograms by rebuilding the whole light field. So yeah, goodbye flat, hello real-life 3D.
Call me a nerd, but when Wetzstein told Stanford Report that this could beat out anything on the shelf today with all its holography jazz, I was like, “Well, show me the magic!”
The idea—besides blowing our minds—is to dish out realistic 3D across a big field-of-view. No more squinting or squirming your eyes around to get the story. Keeps the image crisp, even if your eyes have their own little dance party.
Yet, if you’re scratching your head, wondering why we haven’t seen this wizardry in headsets till now, it’s this thing called “étendue.” Kinda like a speed bump for how big the view can get. Spatial Light Modulators (SLMs) haven’t cracked it till now.
Last year, this team kicked things off with waveguides. Now? They’ve stacked up a barely-there-thick prototype. What’s next? Commercial stuff is still a bit down the road, but Wetzstein isn’t losing sleep over it. Optimism is his jam.
The ultimate dream? Making it so you can’t tell what’s real from what’s digital—the so-called “Visual Turing Test.” I mean, imagine not knowing if that sunset’s real or just a bunch of pixels. Suyeon Choi, the top dog on the paper, mentioned that.
And in case you missed it, Meta’s Reality Labs also recently unveiled some goggles that wrap VR and MR tech into a slick style. They’ve got some different optics there—like they didn’t go the waveguide route.
So, yeah, wild world we live in, huh?
