Mobile phones fitted with 5000ppi holographic projectors next year

OK then. Who hasn’t been waiting to squirt out a hologram of Princess Leia telling Ben Kenobi that he’s her only hope from their phone? You could well be doing just that next year.

That’s right, real actual 3D holograms that float in midair are finally here.

Not only that, but the company that’s made the breakthrough, Ostendo, has created a hologram using its 5,000ppi projectors – wait for it – that can fit into smartphones.

Better still, Ostendo intends to kit up your mobile in the second half of 2015.

The hologram is created using six projectors that layer light to create an image floating in the air, like a real solid object.

Ostendo’s projectors are roughly the size of Tic Tacs, powered by a computer chip that can control the colour, brightness and angle of each beam of light across one million pixels.

One chipset, small enough to fit into a smartphone, is capable of projecting video on a surface with a 48-inch diagonal.

According to Ostendo’s chief executive and founder, Hussein S. El-Ghoroury:

Display is the last frontier. Over the years, processing power has improved and networks have more bandwidth, but what is missing is comparable advancement in display.

The discovery has come from fusing an image processor with a wafer of micro LEDs to create the Quantum Photonic Imager – how futuristic does that sound?

The projector is roughly the size of a Tic Tac and is powered by the chip which controls the colour, brightness and angle of each beam of light.

The holographic projector prototype, as demoed to The Wall Street Journal, displayed a floating 3D dice which looked solid from all viewing angles.

While the iPhone’s Retina Display churns out 300ppi, this “object” is displayed with almost real 5,000ppi projectors.

Ostendo says it is working with handset manufacturers now for a 2D projector in a mobile by the summer of 2015. But the full 3D projector should arrive later in 2015.

Amazon is rumoured to release a phone soon that features four cameras to track eyes and create a virtual hologram within the screen. If this holographic projector happens then Amazon is going to be left behind right from the release of its first phone.

Ostendo is aiming to make the pixels even smaller to achieve higher resolutions. It will also be scaling up the size so 3D holographic projections can even appear from our TVs.

Personally, I’m not going to bother with 3D or 4K just yet… bring on dinosaurs and aliens beamed in to my living room!