I recently discovered Voxon’s VLED technology, which produces holograms that can be viewed from 360 degrees so everyone can experience them from their own perspective. Naturally, I had to learn more!
Since this is technology you have to see to believe, here’s an impressive video demonstration they posted on YouTube to give you a sense for where they are today:
That demo uses their largest display available, the VX2-XL, which is designed for commercial use cases like museums. I imagine it would look even more amazing in person!
To give you another perspective for how this technology could be used, here’s Genie to introduce the VLED technology on their smaller VX2 model which clearly doesn’t have the resolution of their commercial model:
With a price tag of $6,800 I can’t say I’d run out to buy one any time soon 🤯
Here’s some details on the VX2 model:
With its precision-engineered dual high-speed LED array, rotating at 900 RPM, and a bespoke volumetric graphics engine, the VX2 creates dynamic, colorful, and interactive 3D visuals that can be seen clearly from every direction.
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.
Here’s a much lower resolution LPC1768 microcontroller-based prototype that I felt gives a good sense for how this technology works:
And here’s the Voxon prototype that was posted 4 years ago, which is super cool at such an early stage.
Developer SDK for Blender and Unity!
I was really excited to learn that they offer an SDK and simulator for developers to explore creating content without having to fork over serious cash for the hardware!
To streamline development, our VX2 simulator runs directly on your PC, allowing you to develop and test programs quickly without the need for hardware.
You can download their SDK from the “Developers” page on their website.
VX2 Simulator Test
I will say that I wasn’t super impressed with the standalone simulator. It does give you a sense of how your content would look broken down into voxels (3D pixels). I just have to look past the strip down the middle of the rendering that seemed to occasionally distort the image.
Here’s a screenshot of the simulator that I ran locally which allowed me to run several sample animations. This animated boy model making different expressions was the only one I felt was worth sharing here:
Overall, this will still be handy to have for testing some of my upcoming Blender projects with. I only wish I could compare how the samples look on an actual display.
Video Games
Even though I’m learning how to work with the Unreal Engine and Unity game engines, I’m not big on playing video games.
I still thought this demonstration was awesome enough that I had to share it!
The Future of VJing?
If you’ve been following my projects, you’ll know I’m into audio visualizations.
Practicality
As cool as all this is, it’s not something you can walk through like you see in sci-fi movies. That means it takes up physical space like the old giant CRT monitors did.
That is the only reason I question the viability of this outside providing “wow” factor in an environment like a museum or corporate display.
That said, even if this is today’s CRT monitor version of holographic displays, some day we could have something that everyone carries in their pocket. I just doubt that will be built on LED arrays.
Either way, I’ll be keeping an eye on Voxon’s progress to see how this technology progresses!
Article Image
I generated this article’s image using Google Labs Image FX, which uses the Imagen model.
Prompt: 3D hologram of a jet engine over a circular projector
