At the beginning of July, we talked about Hydrogen, the new smartphone that RED will begin distributing in 2018. In addition to good specifications, RED aims to take the market by storm with its new “holographic display”, although nobody knows for sure how it works. Fortunately, CEO Jim Jannard decided to fix that, and shared that the display comes from a collaboration with LEIA Inc., a company specialized in the development of light fields.
For every great promise related to virtual reality, the future owes us an equivalent in holography. The much-desired holodeck from Star Trek may never arrive (despite excellent developments from Microsoft Research that seek to imitate it), and that forces us to explore other options, like personal assistants. However, the people at RED are convinced that holography has a place among mobile devices, something they will try to demonstrate starting in 2018 with their RED Hydrogen. Of course, one of the biggest doubts we have about the phone is how its display works. CEO Jim Jannard shared new details in this regard.
In reality, the holographic display uses technology from LEIA Inc., a spin-off of Hewlett-Packard labs founded in January 2014. Its solution is called DLB (short for “Diffractive Lightfield Backlighting”), and essentially applies nanostructures to the LCD, enabling a “directional backlight” that projects visible light only from certain angles, leading to a 3D appearance of objects. Technically, DLB technology can disable its light field mode to deliver a standard experience, so the user should have no issues playing traditional content on the smartphone.
While RED has already shared a prototype of its Hydrogen with the press (you can see the video by clicking here), live demos of its display remain under embargo, so we need to wait a bit longer. There are still some details to resolve, and although RED insists that the holographic display will not affect battery performance, we can only verify that once the Hydrogen reaches the market.
