Microsoft wants to deliver an immersive, holographic experience that you can strap to your face. A team of Canadians wants to give you a way to hold them in the palm of your hand.
This is a new smartphone prototype called HoloFlex. It’s being developed by researchers at the Human Media Lab at Queens the University in Kingston, Ontario. The images on HoloFlex don’t actually float above the screen, however. Its display does have actual depth, though, which gives those images a similarly three-dimensional appearance. No special glasses are required, either. All the optical magic happens on the phone’s bendable 1080p OLED display.
Why are the holographic images so low-resolution if the HoloFlex has a 1080p display? It’s because they’re projected through an array of fisheye microlenses — a total of 16,000 of them cover the surface of the phone — that the Queens team 3D printed for use with the HoloFlex. That results in a much more humble resolution of 160 x 104 pixels for 3D images.
The “Holo” is only part of what makes this prototype unique. The other is the “Flex” part, which they first demonstrated earlier this year. This isn’t just a display like the one on the LG G Flex that can bounce back when it’s deformed. Its bendability serves another purpose: it’s a complimentary input system.
The team’s demo video above shows a few different ways this functionality can be tapped. One is in an Angry Birds game: bend one end of the phone back like you’re putting tension on a catapult, bend it forward to launch your avian missile. In a second example, bending drives movement on the z-axis as a user manipulates a 3D model of a teapot.
In a previous demo, they showed off a comic book reader. To flip through a comic’s pages, all you had to do was give the phone a little bit of a bend. It’s pretty cool stuff, but unfortunately, it’s going to be a while before you see phones you can buy with holographic displays or bending used as input.