Holographic Displays: Past, Present and Future

Holograms have captured the public imagination since their first media representation in Star Wars in 1977. Although fiction, the idea of glowing, 3D projections is based on real-world holographic display technology, which can create 3D image content by manipulating the wave properties of light. However, in practice, the image quality of experimental holograms has significantly lagged traditional displays until recently. What changed? This talk will delve into how hardware improvements met ideas from machine learning to spark a new wave of research in holographic displays. We’ll take a critical look at what this research has achieved, discuss open problems and explore the potential of holographic technology to create head-mounted displays with a glasses-form factor.

About the Speaker

Grace Kuo is a research scientist in the Display Systems Research team at Meta where she works on novel display and imaging technology for virtual and augmented reality. She is particularly interested in the joint design of hardware and algorithms for imaging systems, and her work spans optics, optimization, signal processing and machine learning. Grace’s recent work on “Flamera,” a light-field camera for virtual reality passthrough, won Best-in-Show at the SIGGRAPH Emerging Technology showcase and received wide-spread positive press coverage from venues like Forbes and UploadVR. Grace earned her BS at Washington University in St. Louis and her PhD at the University of California, Berkeley, advised by Dr. Laura Waller and Dr. Ren Ng.