Kim Hyun-bin began his journalism career at Arirang TV from 2012 to 2017, specializing in defense, foreign affairs and the economy. In 2018, he joined The Korea Times, covering society and business, and is currently responsible for embassy affairs.
Samsung researchers open new chapter for holographic displays
The lead Samsung researchers who developed a state-of-the art holographic display are, from left, Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology (SAIT) principal researcher An Jung- kwuen, staff researcher Won Kang-hee, and professor Lee Hong-seok. Courtesy of Samsung Electronics
By Kim Hyun-bin
By Kim Hyun-bin
A small, empty room looks dull and lonely, but with the swipe of a hand the red horizon from the Maldives lights up, and in another second, the user is in the center of New York City's Times Square.
Hologram technology makes all this possible, allowing a person to experience reality and virtual reality immediately. The hologram was invented in 1947 and has long been regarded as the most perfect way to represent an object with light. But it has met commercial difficulties due to technical limitations.
In conventional holograms, when illuminated, the pixels scatter light waves causing an interaction to generate an image.
Holography creates static holograms using laser beams to encode an image onto a recording medium by sending the coherent light from the lasers through a spatial light modulator, where scientists can produce holograms.
As part of efforts to find wider uses for holograms, researchers from the Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology (SAIT), which has long recognized holograms' limitless potential, began to study the development of holographic displays. After eight years of trials, the team published a thesis on slim-panel holographic video displays in the world-renowned scientific journal Nature Communications Nov. 10.
“I have confidence that we can make a holographic display as a product in the near future,” the study's senior author Lee Hong-seok, a professor at SAIT, said.
The holographic display is the most ideal 3D display and creates images of objects that don't actually exist.
“While a conventional display depicts images based on light intensity, holograms control not just the intensity of light but also its phase to produce images that appear three-dimensional,” Lee said.
A key reason why holographic displays are seen as the most ideal form of 3D display comes down to how human beings perceive depth.
“The human eye utilizes various depth perception cues, including binocular parallax, two-pupil angles, focus adjustment and motion parallax, to recognize the depth of an object,” said An Jung-kwuen, principal researcher at SAIT. “While most 3D display methods provide only some of these cues, a hologram provides them all. It perfectly replicates objects with light, producing images that look as lifelike as the real thing.”
The hologram technology could be embedded in diverse industries, from visiting a patient in quarantine to producing virtual blueprints and virtual navigation. However, due to the large screen and correlation of the viewing angle, it has been difficult to utilize the technology.
To solve the issue of narrow viewing angles, SAIT's holographic display research team developed a special optical element called a steering-backlight unit (S-BLU).
“An S-BLU consists of a thin, panel-shaped light source called a coherent-backlight unit (C-BLU), which transforms an incident beam into a collimated beam, and a beam deflector, which can adjust the incident beam to a desired angle,” said Won Kang-hee, a staff researcher at SAIT.
“A conventional 4K screen, 10 inches in size, offers a very small viewing angle of 0.6 degrees. However, you can expand the viewing angle roughly 30-fold by bending the image toward the viewer using S-BLU.”