Canadian researchers have developed what they are claiming is the world's first holographic flexible smartphone, with a bendable display that allows multiple people looking at the device to see different 3D images depending on their perspective.
To view the device, called Holoflex, you don’t need those dumb plastic glasses you have to wear in the cinema to watch 3D movies, and it doesn’t employ head tracking to tailor the appearance to the viewer, as seen in devices like the newer Nintendo 3DS.
Instead, the smartphone sports a Full HD LED display with 1,920 x 1,080 resolution — albeit one that’s flexible.
So how does it actually work? Well, when the device displays images, it renders them into 12-pixel wide circular blocks. Over the top of the display is a thin 3D-printed microlens array, consisting of over 16,000 fisheye lenses.
When the pixel blocks are viewed through the lens array, it makes the images look 3D to the viewer depending on their angle, when in fact they’re actually only two-dimensional.
The one downside to this technique is it makes the appearance of the display decidedly more pixellated. Once the full HD resolution is effectively down-sampled via the image-rendering process, you’re left with a pretty chunky-looking 160 x 104 resolution image.
“HoloFlex offers a completely new way of interacting with your smartphone,” said one of the researchers, Roel Vertegaal from the Human Media Lab at Queen’s University in Canada.
