Industry Consumer electronics Headquarters Menlo Park Type of business Private | Website www.leia3d.com Founded 2013 | |
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Founder David Fattal, Pierre-Emmanuel Evreux, Zhen Peng | ||
LEIA Inc is a Silicon Valley startup company developing an interactive holographic display for mobile devices. LEIA is also developing software to facilitate content creation for its holographic platform. While its main target is mobile applications (wearables, Internet of Things (IoT); smartphones, tablets), LEIA’s technology is also aimed at the AR/VR, automotive and medical markets.
Contents
LEIA’s display uses standard LCD technology augmented by a proprietary diffraction layer that allows multiple viewers to experience the 3D stereoscopic effect with full parallax and smooth transitions between views. It differs from the 3D displays on the market as no glasses or eye-tracking are required, and a multitude of people can view the effect from a wide field of view (about 60°).
The company was founded by former HP Labs researchers and became completely independent in January 2014, after closing a series A funding round.
LEIA Inc is headquartered in Menlo Park, California, with a nanofabrication center in Palo Alto and pilot line in Suzhou, China.
History
LEIA’s display technology relies on technological breakthrough - a multiview backlight - developed by the core LEIA team during their tenure at HP Labs in Palo Alto. The breakthrough came as an offshoot of the team’s research effort on optical interconnects, the use of Photonics to carry light signals inside and between computer chips.
After working on a laser-based version in 2011, the team transitioned to a more standard LED-based illumination system in 2012 when they realized that the technology was compatible with LCD displays.
In 2013, the first dynamic prototypes were demonstrated and the technology was featured on the cover of Nature Magazine. MIT’s Technology Review named David Fattal, LEIA Inc’s Founder and CEO, French Innovator of the year for the invention of the multiview backlight the same year.
In January 2014, LEIA Inc was officially founded as an independent entity.
In March 2015, LEIA Inc showcased their technology at the MWC in Barcelona, drawing the attention of multiple different news sources (WSJ, Reuters, CNN, Yahoo!Tech.).
In October 2015, LEIA Inc released a Holographic Dev Kit to let developers experiment with interactive holograms on a 2.2’’ display.
In April 2016, LEIA Inc announced a partnership with Technology and Media group Altice to release a holographic smartphone in the European market by end of 2017.
Technology
In its current iteration, the display developed by LEIA Inc is a diffraction-based system able to project up to 64 different images in different directions of space. The diffractive layer extracts LED light from a light guide and forms narrow light beams that propagate towards the viewers, unlike regular LED or LCD that send a beam of light in one direction only. The intensity of each light beam is independently modulated by a dedicated pixel on a front-facing LCD panel. Color can be achieved either via spatial-multiplexing (RGB color filters on dedicated LCD subpixels) or via temporal-multiplexing (time-sequential RGB illumination).
The display achieves a wide 60° field of view and offers full parallax to create a seamless 3D impression regardless of head-motion (horizontal / vertical motion, tilt or rotation). The diffracted beam parameters can be adjusted to suppress skipping or “dark zones” between views and repeating images outside the field of view.
Since the front-facing element of the display is a regular LCD panel, it is readily compatible with touch and hover-panel technologies and can be integrated into any screen. It can also switch between displaying 2D and 3D content, without any hardware or software modification.
Due to the technology of the display, video of the screen caught on a regular camera will not show the effect. The 3D effect can only be seen with the naked eye.
Display characteristics
Holographic IDE
LEIA Inc has developed a Unity 3D plug-in to facilitate the conversion of existing 3D or VR content or creation of new content for its holographic platform. A WebGL API is also available as an extension of Three.js.
Awards
LEIA Inc.’s founder David Fattal was named French Innovator of the year by the MIT Technology Review in 2013 for the invention of the multiview backlight, and was featured on their global list of ‘35 Innovators Under 35’ the same year.
"There has been very little innovation in the basic physics for making 3-D images since early in the 20th century. This new display is transforming a technology that’s been around for 100 years." - MIT Technology Review, 2013
LEIA’s core multiview backlight concept was featured on the cover of Nature in the March 21st 2013 issue.