“Magic” is how Voxiebox co-inventors Will Tamblyn and Gavin Smith described their invention the first time laid eyes on it. What they were looking at was a holographic volume of light, floating in the darkness.
“It really was magical,” Smith says. “One of the first things we displayed was a little T-Rex dinosaur. It wasn’t an image of a dinosaur, it was an actual dinosaur. You could walk around it and see it from every angle. It was a model made out of light.”
Smith and Tamblyn are two parts of VOXON, a company that reaches from South Australia to Silicon Valley. Their invention is the Voxiebox – a swept-surface volumetric display.
In other words, a 3D hologram viewable from all sides without any glasses, headsets or other equipment required.
The Voxiebox has potential in advertising, education, design, gaming, entertainment, medical applications and more.
“Will and I used to have Thursday night lab sessions. We’d hang out in the back shed, drink beer and make stuff. We did lathing, built CNC machines, we took things apart and built them in to other things,” Smith explains.
“One night we’d had a few beers and were inspired to build a robot with a holographic projector for a head, inspired by Star Wars and the Princess Leia holograms. We were just having a laugh. We didn’t think it would be possible, because if it was, these things would be everywhere already.”
Their early experiments were typical back shed inventions, using whatever the two could find lying around. The first attempt used an old Nokia phone, shaken up and down rapidly on the piston of a lawn mower engine block, manually cranked by an electric drill.
It created a cube of light in the dark shed. It was the first step on the journey to a fully-realised, volumetric 3D hologram.
Smith and Tamblyn eventually had a working prototype – but their excitement faded. Around three years ago they came across a YouTube video of almost identical technology in the United States – the demo was even similar, a woolly mammoth rather than their dinosaur.
They rushed out a crowd funding campaign in an attempt to beat the American team to the punch, but their prototype wasn’t mature enough and funding failed. The campaign had an unexpected consequence though: the US team noticed their efforts and proposed a merger.
They took on the existing company name, VOXON, and merged their prototypes in to the Voxiebox. The team is split between Adelaide, where Smith and Tamblyn work out of the Tonsley advanced manufacturing precinct, San Francisco, where their CEO Sandira Calviac is based, New York and Rhode Island.
One of their partners is Ken Silverman, the man who programmed the graphics for classic games like Duke Nukem 3D and Shadow Warrior use.
“The immediacy of the device is one of the key driving points. You can plonk it on a table in a meeting, or a school or an airport. People gather around it. You get a shared social experience,” Smith says.
Voxiebox works by rapidly moving a flat screen up and down. An extremely fast projector projects ‘slices’ of light on to the screen as it moves. When it’s moving fast, the screen blurs and a fully animated volume of light remains, made up of the slices of light.
“In the last year our company has done demos across America and Australia. We’ve demoed to NASA, SpaceX, Tesla Motors, Intel, Palmer Lucky from Oculus Rift, even Steve Wozniak (Apple co-founder) had a look at the device.
The team sees gaming has obvious potential. They’ve already ported over classics like Pac Man and more recent indie hits like Voxatron.
They’ve taken the Voxiebox to schools, explaining difficult concepts like four dimensional hypercubes. NASA has used it to project 3D models of asteroids. There’s medical potential too, such as displaying scans of organs and bones.