Holograms to beam from your smartphone soon

What appears to be straight from a sci-fi movie, holographic projections from cell phones are likely to be a reality soon.

A California-based startup company Ostendo Technologies has created world's first hologram projector chip that can emit crisp videos and glasses-free 3D images for smartphones and giant screens.

One chipset, small enough to fit into a smartphone, is capable of projecting video on a surface with a 48-inch diagonal.

A patchwork of chips, laid together, can form far larger and more complex images.

"The first iteration of the chip will only project 2D videos, but the next version, expected to follow soon after will feature holographic capability," Hussein S. El-Ghoroury, founder of Ostendo, was quoted as saying in a Wall Street Journal report.

"Display is the last frontier. Over the years, processing power has improved and networks have more bandwidth, but what is missing is comparable advancement in display," he added.

The chip combines an image processor with a wafer containing radically miniaturised light-emitting diodes (LEDs).

The system can control the colour, brightness and angle of more than a million individual beams of light.

"The key to the chip's 3D capability is its resolution. Ostendo's system puts out 5,000 dots per square inch. Apple's Retina display, by contrast, has about 300 dots per inch," explained Ramesh Raskar, an associate professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) who is working on 3D displays for MIT's Media Lab.