Sure thing, here’s a rewrite:
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So, here’s the deal. Meta Reality Labs and the brainiacs over at Stanford are playing around with holograms. Honestly, I’m kinda geeking out about it. Picture this: they’ve cooked up a display that fits into something as small as your regular pair of glasses. Yeah, you heard right, glasses—not those bulky VR headsets that make you look like a droid from a sci-fi flick.
Anyway, they published this thing in Nature Photonics, which, if you’re like me and didn’t know, is a fancy science mag. So, this professor Gordon Wetzstein (what a name, right?) from Stanford teamed up with folks from Meta. They’re using some sort of waveguide holography magic with AI to make 3D stuff look super real. Like, so real, you might forget you’re staring at a screen.
Okay, let me back up a sec. These things aren’t quite transparent like those HoloLens doohickies—more like mixed reality than augmented. And only 3 millimeters thick! Seriously, that’s thinner than a slice of ham. They’ve got this Spatial Light Modulator too, which, um, somehow modulates light pixel-by-pixel. Science, am I right?
Oh, and I saw this image—couldn’t help it—it’s all techy with graphs or whatever. But get this, unlike those old-school XR headsets that kind of fake 3D by making your eyes see two flat pics, this setup kicks it up a notch with full-on holograms. Like, real deal, depth and everything.
Wetzstein is all over this. He’s saying things like how holography does stuff no other display can. Sounds super official if you ask me. And apparently, it’s got this wide field of view and something called an eyebox. Not just for folks with big noggins like me, but for everyone.
Now, why aren’t we all walking around with these things on our faces yet? Turns out they’ve been stuck by this funky limitation called étendue. No idea how to pronounce that, by the way. But it means they struggled to make this tech work both wide and up close at the same time—like seeing everything crystal clear, no matter how you look at it.
And, little side note, they call this project part two of a trilogy. Last year, they did something cool with waveguides. This year, they’re prototyping. Next? Maybe we’ll actually get to buy these things. Fingers crossed.
But wait, get this! They’re aiming for what they call a “Visual Turing Test.” I’m no expert, but it sounds like trying to fool our eyes into thinking digital images are as real as seeing an apple on the table. It’s wild. Suyeon Choi, the paper’s lead author, spilled the beans on that one.
Just gotta mention too, Meta’s other project is doing different cool stuff with VR goggles—using reflective polarizers or something. Not the same gig, but cool in its own way.
And that’s the scoop. Mind-bending, right?
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