Video: Here’s A Volumetric Display That’s Much Closer To The Pop Culture Idea Of Holograms

November 27, 2024 by Dave Haynes

I natter away here when specialty display companies call their transparent LD or OLED screens, Pepper’s Ghost projections or spinning LED light thingies holograms, explaining that they’re not, because while the outputs may appear to float in a space, those visuals are two-dimensional and don’t have depth or dimension. Here, though, is a genuine 3D volumetric display.

It is from the Australian tech firm Voxon – what it called the world’s largest 3D volumetric display. It has a display volume that is 512 mm in diameter, and 256 mm in height (20.5″ x 10″). The device, says Voxon, can render interactive 3D volumetic visuals, with up to 16 million “voxels” in color.

Like the LED rotors, this uses the visual trick of persistence of vision.

The VX2-XL unit – XL we’ll safely assume references Extra Large – runs off a standard Windows PC, and C/C++ programming API, as well as additional support for Unity and Blender workflows.

Here’s how Voxon explains its tech:

Rotating at 900 RPM, the VLED array sweeps through a cylindrical volume 30 times per second. During each complete rotation, Voxon’s high-speed graphics engine converts each 3D geometric scene into a cylindrical array of volume slices.

These slices are transmitted to and displayed on the VLED matrix at an astonishing 7,400 frames per second. The rapid rotation, coupled with the high image refresh rate, enables the device to render colorful and detailed interactive 3D scenes at 30 volumes per second.

Each volumetric image is comprised of millions of individual points of light that occupy a physical space within a cylindrical volume. 

The LED matrix rapidly rotates, displaying different 2D image slices of a 3D object at specific angles. Because of the speed at which the LED matrix spins and the persistence of vision effect, the human eye blends these slices together.

I did a podcast with Voxon back in 2023: