IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine - November/December 2020 - 90

Column: The Art of Storage

Let's Build a Holodeck!
Tom Coughlin
Coughlin Associates

& BEING

COOPED UP at home for several months
and connecting with people through various webinars leaves one wishing that there were better
ways to connect with each other and also get out
and experience the world more, even if virtually.
Some of today's virtual reality and augmented
reality experiences are really stunning, but they
just are not a real replacement for being somewhere else. As an old Star Trek fan, what I really
want is a holodeck like that shown in Figure 1!
So, what would it take to create an immersive
environment like the holodeck? Well we are probably many years away from matter materialization
and force fields but can we create a holographic
environment where images seem to surround us
with real depth, giving a feeling of presence missing from normal flat displays? Today's 4K and 8K
content can take a lot of capacity and bandwidth,1
but let us look at the amount of data and bandwidth we would need to approach the imagery of
a truly virtual environment.
At a conference in Silicon Valley in 2019,2 I
learned a bit about what the requirements would
be for more immersive video images. David Ward
from Cisco said that 12K 360 video could
require 24.4 TB for an hour of content and
require uncompressed data rates of 54.3 Gb/s
(probably want to compress that).

Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MCE.2020.3011084
Date of publication 22 July 2020; date of current version
9 October 2020.

2162-2248 ß 2020 IEEE

Creating a real immersive visual illusion may
require volumetric imaging which processes and
stores all of the light from all directions around
an imaged object. Such volumetric images can
be displayed with a real holographic display
with full depth and a flat image can be viewed
with the focal point changed on demand. Volumetric images require much more storage capacity and bandwidth that traditional images at a
given resolution. It is things like this that are
driving the explosion in data generation and
required storage capacity. Jon Karafin, a founder
of Light Field Lab, said that they have been
developing a holographic display technology
that could be miniaturized and scaled to create
a volumetric image on a panel and even the wall
of a room. Figure 2 shows what such a holographic wall would look like.
There is even a group called the Immersive
Digital Experiences Alliance3 that that has created a product timeline for commercial introduction of various volumetric image products. So,
sometime in the next few years we may have volumetric display technologies perhaps as display
panels and display walls (perhaps in museums
or even theatres) but a true holodeck is probably many years off. It is estimated that more
than 512K resolution volumetric images may be
needed to create the real visual holodeck experience (and we still need matter materialization
and force fields). I guess we will have to wait a
while for that holodeck.

Published by the IEEE Consumer Technology Society

IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine

IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine - November/December 2020

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