LEIA Inc

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LEIA Inc
Private
Industry Consumer electronics
Founded 2013
Founder David Fattal, Pierre-Emmanuel Evreux, Zhen Peng
Headquarters Menlo Park, California, USA
Website www.leiainc.com

LEIA Inc is a Silicon Valley startup company developing an interactive holographic display for mobile devices.[1] LEIA is also developing software tools to facilitate the creation of content for its holographic platform. Besides its use for mobile applications (wearables, Internet of Things (IoT); smartphones, tablets), LEIA’s technology is also aimed at the automotive and medical markets.[2]

The display uses standard LCD technology augmented by a proprietary diffraction layer that lets any number of viewers experience a 3D stereoscopic effect from a wide view zone,[3] with full parallax and smooth transitions between views, without the need for glasses or eye-tracking hardware/software.[4]

The company was founded by former HP Labs researchers and became completely independent in January 2014, after closing a series A funding round.

The headquarter is in Menlo Park, California with a nanofabrication center in Palo Alto and the assembly facility is in Suzhou, China.

History

The early days : Laser-based multiview display prototype developed at HP Labs in 2011

LEIA’s display technology relies on a technological breakthrough—a multiview backlight—developed by the core LEIA team during their tenure at HP Labs in Palo Alto.[5] The team had been working on an early laser-based version in 2011 before transitioning to a more standard LED-based illumination system in 2012.[6]

In 2013, the first dynamic prototypes were demonstrated, and the same year the technology was featured on the cover of Nature.[7]

In January 2014, LEIA Inc was founded as an independent entity after closing a series A funding round.

Technology

Multiview Backlight

In its current state, the display developed by LEIA Inc is a diffraction based system able to project 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. 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).[8]

LEIA display achieves a wide 3D field of view of 60 degrees[3] 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 “jumps” or “dark zones” between views and repeating images outside the field of view.[9]

Since the front-facing element of the display is a regular LCD panel, it is readily compatible with touch and hovering panel technologies.

Display characteristics

Holographic IDE

LEIA Inc has released a web-based development environment (IDE) and an API to guide the creation of holographic content for any multiview 3D display platform, including its own display. It currently supports WebGL via Three.js, and a Unity plug-in is on its way.

Awards

David Fattal, Founder and CEO of LEIA Inc, 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.[10]

"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.[7][11]

References

  1. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  2. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 "The Holographic Smartphone Display Is Real, and It's Awesome", Yahoo Tech, March 2015
  4. ↑ “Scientists Have Created A Glasses-Free, 3D Display”, The Guardian, March 2013
  5. ↑ "New 3D Display Could Let Phones And Tablets Produce Holograms", MIT Technology Review, March 2013
  6. ↑ David Fattal “Mobile Holography”, Stanford talks, April 2014
  7. ↑ 7.0 7.1 “A Multi-Directional Backlight For A Wide-Angle, Glasses-Free Three-Dimensional Display”, Nature, March 2013
  8. ↑ "On Our Way To Glasses-Free 3D", HP Labs, 2013
  9. ↑ “LEIA Aims To Bring Holographic Displays To Your Phone”, Extreme Tech, April 2014
  10. ↑ Video, Innovators Under 35: David Fattal, TR35, November 2013
  11. ↑ “'Hologram-Lite' Idea For 3D Phone Displays”, Nature, March 2013

External links

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