Grace Kuo

Reality Labs Research at Meta, USA

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.
 

Pietro Ferraro

Institute of Applied Sciences and Intelligent Systems "Eduardo Caianiello" (ISASI-CNR), Italy

Holography has evolved from a promising but illusory concept to a transformative tool in biomedical imaging. Leveraging intrinsic features of digital holography, it enables single cell analysis, quantitative phase imaging and stain-free microscopy. This breakthrough, enhanced by artificial intelligence, opens new frontiers in diagnosis and therapy with intelligent flow-cytometers through 3D imaging.

About the Speaker

Pietro Ferraro is Director of Research at the CNR Institute of Applied Sciences and Intelligent Systems (ISASI), Italy. He served as ISASI Director from 2014 to 2019 and President of CNR Research Area in Pozzuoli from 2012 to 2019. Ferraro has held leadership roles in various organizations and worked as Principal Investigator with Alenia Aeronautics from 1988 to 1993. His research spans holography, microscopy, micro-nanostructures, non-destructive testing and optical sensors, with over 350 journal papers, 20,000 citations and 14 patents. A Fellow of both Optica and SPIE, he received the SPIE Gabor Award and served on the Scientific and Technical Committee for the Italian Space Agency from 2018 to 2023.

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