Avalon Holographics launches true holographic display Novac

Avalon Holographics unveiled Novac, its first commercially available, true holographic table display.

With it, groups can visualize detailed holograms together, turning their 3D content into mechanisms for high-powered decision making without glasses, headsets or tracking systems that can leave them feeling worn out or nauseous. With the ability to leverage AI, digital twins and more, Novac is a powerful way to garner insights and create experiences that help people do more with their data.

Because Novac is a true holographic display, it can deliver unparalleled real-time depth and accuracy, without the stereoscopic tricks that limit experiences to a single person. Instead, multiple users can walk around the display at once, as they explore different perspectives, just like they would with a real object. This freedom encourages real-time collaboration that not only gets everyone from military commanders and doctors to factory executives on the same page, but helps them retain more information as they do it.

“If you can’t see it, you might miss it,” said Wally Haas, president of Avalon Holographics in St. Johns, Newfoundland, Canada. “Novac gives decision makers all the visual information they need to make the right choice — in a format that is as easy as using a TV. Groups can now simulate scenarios, assess risks and adjust strategies on the fly, ensuring that everything from space missions to surgical training go off without a hitch.”

Novac can be applied to any high-stakes environment where real-time insights are needed to gain confidence and clarity. With research funding from tier-1 contractors, Novac has already found success in the defense industry, where commanders are prioritizing next-gen visualization tools for situation awareness, mission planning, etc.

Because Novac can also ingest nearly any 3D asset, it is primed for any industry utilizing digital twins. A recent Omniverse integration will make this technology instantly valuable to executives in manufacturing, automotive, robotics, aerospace operations and more, especially when paired with future voice command updates.

With 61 patents and $65 million in funding, Avalon is at the nexus of three rapidly accelerating markets (holographics, digital twins and immersive experiences) which have projected growth rates between 25-40% over the next five years. As creator of the first commercially available true holographic display, Avalon is uniquely positioned to open up new opportunities in each, bringing holograms to a much wider audience.

To build Novac ’s successor, Avalon is actively raising $50 million in additional investment to accelerate the transition from projector-based holography to OLED-based tiles. When available, these 6-inch flat tile panels can be linked together to make massive tables, walls and showroom displays at an accessible price point. Not only will this be effective for digital twin environments, but immersive brand experiences for theme parks, esports, retail and location-based entertainment.

Availability

Novac is available now and optimized for Nvidia RTX GPUs, Windows and Linux. It offers seamless integration with Unreal Engine, Unity and key digital content creation applications, while also providing support for industry-standard file formats like OBJ, FBX, GLTF, 3DTiles, DICOM and GIS.

Origins

Haas had a previous optical telecom startup Avalon Microelectronics, which he sold to Altera in 2010. He worked at Intel (which acquired Altera) for four years, and then he got interested in holographic displays, as he was inspired by the film Iron Man. He started Avalon Holographics in 2015.

His new company has more than 100 people and it has more than 60 patents, with another 60 in the pipeline.

“I thought this was really something interesting, and then through the process of learning about holographics. We benefited from the experience that I had with optical telecom. It’s taken us 10 years to get here, but we finally have this large holographic display, and we’re just super excited to show it,” he said.

As for the 10 years, he said, “It’s just been a bit of a journey.”

The company created four holographic display prototypes so far, and sold them as research devices to groups such as the Canadian Armed Forces.

“This is our first full product, but the right way to think of it is just the first stepping stone on a long journey we’re making,” he said.

The company is raising money for a display that looks more like a flat panel, and it will be able to allow for larger tables, walls and immersive experiences full of holographic effects, like where part of the image appears to float in the air above the display.

Creating a hologram

Rivals include Light Field Lab in San Jose, California. And some folks often disagree what the word “hologram” really means. The name itself from the Greek means “full information.”

“You put a beam on an emulsion, and you specify, you illuminate it and then the constructive phase creates an image. But human eyes don’t determine phase. They only get color direction and intensity. So we are technically a light field display, but we are a holographic display, because hologram literally means full information,” Haas said. “We are reproducing light the way that exists in the real world, and we are producing rays of light. So conceptually, we’re moderately similar to Light Field Lab in the way that we are producing a real hologram.”

He added that it is not auto stereoscopic. When you walk around the big black box, you can see different parts of the 3D image, so you can see that it is being rendered in 3D.

“We are producing rays of light, and you’ll see in a second the we have five billion rays. That’s by far the densest, the biggest holographic display ever made. But the way that you see light in the real world is light bounces off real objects and then comes in your eyes with a certain vector,” he said. “We do the exact same thing, but the way that we produce the light is, instead of perfectly straight wavefronts, they’re more like cones. And so as digital objects, either get too far in or too far out of the frame, they’ll get a bit foggy. And because it’s ray based, it only has a certain limited field of view, and so we can’t see the hologram from this perspective, but as soon as you get up there it’s super cool.”

Cool demo, heavy-duty hardware

He showed me you can put your hand through the top of the hologram, above the glass cover (for protection) of the display. It was foggy and pixelated, but it was real 3D. Haas proved that to me by showing me two parking lots in a landscape. I could see that one of the lots was at a higher elevation, even when viewed from above.

“You get that spatial awareness in a situation that humans immediately understand. That proves that you’re seeing a real light field,” Haas said. “It proves that you’re actually seeing something that is producing rays of light the way that a human body perceives it. This is the fourth one ever built. No one else can do this except a true holographic display. And that’s one of the things that makes us really unique.”

The device uses thousands and thousands of tiny projectors, manipulating light to make tiles, or little squares of the image. They put it through a custom optical system to produce the rays. It’s a costly system now, but it will be reduced over time. The Novac system in front of me had 12 tiles, but I could not tell where the seams were, as it was all just one screen. The screen has about six to eight inches of depth.

“The Star Trek Holodeck is the vision, and these are just steps along the way,” he said.

The current hardware runs at 30 frames a second now. But it pulls a lot of data from the internet. The Novac system supports photogrammetry software and Gaussian Splats, which help capture 3D spaces. It works with the open USD format pioneered by Pixar and supported by Nvidia’s Omniverse. It works with Unreal and Unity as well.

Haas showed another application that showed wireless network waves spreading across a city. You could tell where the waves hit obstacles like buildings or cliffs, resulting in lost signals in places like urban canyons. He also showed some images of MRI slices of a human body for medical applications, showing what someone’s kidneys look like.

The Novac system uses an RTX server — a three-rack system with eight graphics processing units (GPUs). The hardware specs include a 40-inch display, a resolution of 63,888 pixels x 69,696 pixels, and a display aspect ratio of 1:1 (square. It has 4.5 billion active pixels, a viewing angle of 74 degrees x 74 degrees and a total weight of 975 pounds. (So nope, it’s not going to be a portable device).

It’s got the effect of a few thousand TVs, runs at 30 frames per second and processes five terabits per second of data. That is about a third of the average internet traffic in Canada, he said. The company designs its own chips to run the compressed algorithm and then the decompression processing. There is a lot of water cooling in the system.

Haas thinks the machines will be able to be the heart of theme park rides in places like Disneyland, or enable precise digital twins via Nvidia’s Omniverse. So it’s likely to find high-end applications.

The full Novac system, once funded, is expected to come out in four years and it will be 10 times better in performance and cost about 10% as much, Haas said. Within a decade, Haas hopes it will be prevalent within society.

Raising money for … Asteroids and more

Haas invested $5 million of his own money into the company, and the firm raised another $40 million. Hardware is expensive, though, and so the company hopes to raise another $60 million.

The defense application was interesting, where it showed an overhead view of a 3D space that captured an operations area. In it, there was a building that a number of military vehicles surrounded. The mission was to extract something from the building, and the vehicles left for extraction after that. The whole imagery was captured by drones with cameras.

One of them is installed at a government lab, and another at a defense installation. There’s also one at a hospital and one in Orlando at the University of Central Florida.

The sharpness of the graphics and the richness of the colors wasn’t there. You could see a screen-door effect on top of the pixelated images. But it was a hologram, as the image stuck out of the display into the air.

Haas handed me an Xbox controller and then booted up the next app, which was a game. I played some Asteroids, a simple 2D game converted into a game with holograms. I had trouble figuring out how to fly in 3D, but it brought home the point of hologram gaming. I felt like I must have been one of the few people in history to play a hologram version of Asteroids.