Belgian-American company Swave Photonics has unveiled its proprietary technology for crafting three-dimensional holographic displays tailored for augmented reality glasses. Midway through the previous year, the firm secured €10 million in seed funding. Its Holographic eXtended Reality (HXR) technology, along with the accompanying chip, enables the creation of displays with pixel pitches under 300 nanometers.
The creators tout their chip as the inaugural spatial light modulator engineered expressly for digital holography and AI-driven spatial computing. The HXR chip can transform light waves into high-fidelity three-dimensional visuals, achieving authentic holography via light diffraction and interference, thus permitting natural image processing by the human brain and eyes without the need for waveguides, varifocal lenses, or stereoscopy. This innovation addresses the vergence-accommodation conflict inherent in stereoscopic images, which can skew the correlation between perceived and actual focal lengths.
Swave employs a conventional semiconductor production technique to potentially minimize costs and has integrated a non-volatile phase-change material into the pixel design. The firm is promising 3D holography with resolutions up to 64 gigapixels, significantly reduced power consumption for devices, and compatibility with corrective lenses through specialized software.
Swave is presently accepting orders for HXR development kits from device manufacturers, with delivery of samples anticipated in the latter half of 2024. These kits comprise both hardware and software necessary for design, prototyping, and testing phases.
