Holographic TV

Not a panel but a room: record a street as light, play it back over a table

A lounge at night with a stone table. A street forms in open air over the table; the camera goes into it and comes out inside the parabolic mirror where it was recorded, the same street standing in the bowl, then back out over the table before the channel changes to a ship in a storm. One room is the whole loop: a 2-inch source, the parabola in the wall and the scene in open air.

What this is

A holographic TV needs about 230 times the sub-pixels of a 4K set, so this concept stops designing the TV and designs the room: a scene forms in open air. The room version borrows the mirascope. A femtosecond laser makes a 2-inch object of light in a vault in the rear wall, a parabolic mirror behind the drywall sends every ray back parallel, and a corrective secondary behind the front wall brings them to a focus over a low table. Capture is the other half: the same optics at life size, recording a real scene as light. A concept study with a bill of materials and two blueprints, and with the numbers the lab’s own ray trace says it has not yet earned stated in the open.

The technical shape

The panel it replaces: a 55-inch light-field panel, no glasses, no tracking · a 160° viewing cone at two views per degree, 1080p per view · 320 views, 640 million ray directions · ~1.9 billion emitters at a 6 µm pitch, fed at ~150 Gbps · about 230× the sub-pixels of a 4K set
Source: a femtosecond laser at megahertz repetition into a sealed neon · argon · xenon chamber · a 2-inch object of light, ~12 million voxels a second, 60 Hz volumetric · a liquid-crystal filter synced to the pulses gives them colour
Loop: passive — nothing in the room moves, nothing tracks you · a segmented parabolic mirror recessed behind the rear drywall sends every ray back parallel · a corrective secondary behind the front wall brings them to a focus over a low table
Isolation: the optical plate floats in non-Newtonian gel · a liquid-cooled jacket, no fans in the room · a 5-minute galvo self-check on wake · no feedback loops, no actuators
Capture: the same optics at life size · a performer stands between two facing concave mirrors · the 1:1 real image forms in the ceiling aperture, where a light-field sensor records the light arriving from every direction
The lab’s own ray trace: magnification ×7.3, not the ×18 the brief asks for — the 2-inch source becomes 14.7 inches instead of 36 · depth stretches ×53 · the eyebox is a cone: the couch sees the image, someone standing beside the table doesn’t
Budget: $250k in hardware, a valuation of lab-grade parts in a home, not a quote — laser engine and gas chamber $175k · mirror array and correction optics $45k · isolation $20k · decoding and alignment firmware $10k · room build-out excluded

The deep end · full technical outline

Outline v2 · expanding

The impossible panel

Start from the uncompromised version: a living-room TV with no glasses, no tracking and no special seat, a movie you can walk around. That is a 55-inch light-field panel with a 160° viewing cone at two views per degree, 1080p per view. It works out to 320 views, 640 million ray directions, roughly 1.9 billion emitters at a 6 µm pitch, fed at ~150 Gbps: about 230 times the sub-pixels of a 4K set. Physics allows it. Nobody can manufacture it. So the lab stopped designing the TV and designed the room.

The room is the loop

The room version borrows the mirascope, the toy that floats a penny over a bowl: two facing parabolic mirrors lift a small real object into a real image in the air. Here the object is made of light. A femtosecond laser at megahertz repetition ionizes a sealed neon, argon and xenon chamber into a 2-inch object, about 12 million voxels a second, and a liquid-crystal filter synced to the pulses gives them colour. It sits in a vault in the rear wall. A segmented parabolic mirror recessed behind the rear drywall sends every ray back parallel; a corrective secondary behind the front wall brings them to a focus over a low table. The scene forms where the rays cross. Nothing in the room moves, nothing tracks you, and different eyes get different sides of the object.

Holding it still

Nothing active holds the loop steady. The optical plate floats in a non-Newtonian gel. The laser chassis sits in a liquid-cooled jacket whose coolant carries its heat to a chiller outside the room, so there are no fans in the room. On wake, a 5-minute galvo self-check aligns it. No feedback loops, no actuators: the building’s footsteps and HVAC turn into trace heat in the gel instead of beam error.

Capture: the other half

This is where the movie comes from. Capture is the same optics as the playback room, at life size. A performer stands between two facing concave mirrors, and the 1:1 real image forms in the ceiling aperture, where a light-field sensor records the light arriving from every direction. Nothing is rendered or reconstructed, so occlusion, parallax and reflections come free. It closes the content problem the cleanest way there is: keep the scene’s light, not a picture of it. Playback re-emits those rays. Record a moment as its full light field, replay it at real size, and you can walk back into the recording: not a video of the street, the street’s light.

The numbers it hasn’t earned

The honest part comes from the lab’s own ray trace. Magnification comes out ×7.3, not the ×18 the brief asks for, so the 2-inch source becomes 14.7 inches instead of 36. Depth magnifies as the square and stretches ×53, so a turning object breathes long and short. And the eyebox is a cone: a couch inside it sees the image; someone standing beside the table doesn’t. The lab publishes these three numbers itself. They say where the next mirror has to go.

What it is not

It is a concept with a bill of materials, not a built device. Neither half is built: the capture stage is drawn, not cast, and the playback loop’s own trace comes up short of its target size, with a viewing cone. The hardware comes to $250k, a valuation of lab-grade parts in a home rather than a quote: laser engine and gas chamber $175k, mirror array and correction optics $45k, isolation $20k, decoding and alignment firmware $10k, room build-out excluded. The idea underneath it: put the display in the optics of the room, not in a panel on the wall, and the ray budget that made the panel impossible stops being the thing you have to manufacture.

Related in the lab

Volume

Volume Painter →: Shares volume — treating what is on screen as matter with height and depth — not a picture that fakes them.

Built at this bench

The machine, the instrument, the film that explains it — all designed and built in-house. The same bench works for hire.

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