In the 1977 Star Wars film A New Hope, there’s an iconic scene where the beloved droid R2-D2 casts a beam of light to create a hologram of Princess Leia pleading for the help of Obi-Wan Kenobi.
Sadly, almost 50 years on, we’re not much closer to the true holograms science fiction promised us, let alone the teleportation devices and flying cars.
Yes, we have AR and VR headsets like Microsoft’s HoloLens or Apple’s Vision Pro, but those simply use transparent screens to give the effect of a hologram. Even Tupac’s famous “live” Coachella performance 16 years after his death was pulled off using a trick of light called Pepper’s ghost. Nope, not a real hologram folks.
Real holograms bend light to create 3D images that hover in the air and are visible from every angle — a bit like how Princess Leia was depicted all those years ago. Holography is a burgeoning field, and there are a few companies that have plans to commercialise the technology. One of them is Swave.
Swave spun out from Belgium’s Imec, one of the world’s foremost research facilities on nanoelectronics, in 2022. The company claims its Holographic eXtended Reality (HXR) display tech is the first to achieve true holography by sculpting lightwaves into 3D life-likeimages.
Swave recently secured €27mn in a funding round led by Belgian wealth fund SFPIM and imec.xpand, a deep tech-focused venture capital spinoff from Imec. The fresh capital follows a €10mn seed round in 2023, bringing the startup’s total raised to €37mn.
“This round will accelerate Swave’s product introductions as we continue to solve the challenges of today’s AR experiences through true holography,” said Mike Noonen, Swave’s CEO.
Swave’s first product is set to be a pair of lightweight smart glasses that could blow the current state-of-the-art out of the water. The glasses have a special display that uses phase-change materials to steer light and sculpt 3D images that you can see from all angles.
The company claims to have developed the world’s smallest pixels (less than 300nm) that help produce clear, high-quality images without straining the eyes. The founders’ ultimate goal is to create applications that can pass the visual Turing test, where virtual reality is indistinguishable from real-world images.
To create full colour, the glasses use a spatial colour system. Instead of using multiple panels or fast switching, it arranges colour filters in a pattern on a single display panel. This system reduces visual artefacts and improves battery life, making the glasses more efficient, said Swave.
The company believes the smart glasses, which are still in testing, will deliver a better depth of field and wider field of view than equivalent headsets while being much smaller and lighter.
Swave’s glasses could also solve some common problems for AR and VR. Users could adjust holograms to their eyesight — without the need for bulky gear. They could also dynamically switch their focus and change the distances of digital objects, which would reduce side effects such as nausea, eye fatigue, and headaches.
Fuelled by the fresh funding, Swave now has its sights set on a product launch.
“With Series A funding secured and silicon running at our partner fabs, we are on track to introduce product development kits and soon thereafter production devices,” said Dmitri Choutov, Swave’s co-founder and COO.
Swave is also working on Heads Up Displays (HUDs) for vehicles as well as a so-called spatial light modulator. This device would create holograms without the need for glasses at all. Now that’s something that might come close to R2-D2’s wizardry — or perhaps even better.