HoloFlex: flexible holographic smartphone

A team of researchers from the Human Media Lab at Queens University in Kingston (Canada) has developed an unusual HoloFlex smartphone .

It is equipped with a flexible OLED screen with a resolution of 1920x1080 pixels, covered with 16,640 microlenses printed on a 3D printer. Three-dimensional image is created from separate circular blocks with a diameter of 12 pixels, each of which has its own lens. Because of this, the resolution of the three-dimensional image is quite low - 160x104. The key advantage of the technology used is that a stereoscopic image can be seen without glasses at any angle that can be observed by several people at the same time. Parallaxmakes the 3D image more realistic. The researchers propose to connect to the Holoflex 3D-camera and hold "holographic" video conferencing.

The smartphone is controlled using gestures traditional for the touchscreen, but the user can also adjust the “depth” of the image by bending the device: by bending it, you can enter coordinates on the applicator (z-axis), that is, move objects toward you or move them away. According to the creators, this will allow, for example, editing three-dimensional objects. In addition, in games like Angry Birds, bending the display can be fired.


Holographic game application physics. The bend is used to bring the character in motion in the direction of the target. As the character moves, it seems that he is “jumping out” of the display.

The smartphone runs on Android 5.1 Lollipop, equipped with 2 GB of RAM and a Qualcomm Snapdragon 810 processor with a clock frequency reduced to 1.5 GHz. Holoflex will be shown to the public today, May 9, at the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (ACM CHI) in San Jose.


Video presentation smartphone HoloFlex