Light Field Lab said it had closed a $28 million Series A round of venture capital financing to support its development of holographic display technology.
The company said it will use the money to commercialize holographic displays that do not require the use of glasses or helmets, starting with video walls for large-format, location-based entertainment and eventually moving into the consumer electronics market.
The funding round was led by Bosch Venture Capital and Taiwania Capital with strategic investment from Samsung Ventures, Verizon Ventures, Comcast, Liberty Global Ventures, NTT Docomo Ventures and HELLA Ventures, with financial investors including Khosla Ventures, Alumni Ventures Group, R7 Partners and Acme Capital, the company said.
Light Field Lab said its technology also includes content distribution hardware and software, suggesting that new 5G networks to be deployed by Verizon, among others, will be used to deliver content to holographic display devices.
“The industry response has been extremely enthusiastic as demonstrated by the strength of our investors,” said Light Field Lab CEO Jon Karafin in a prepared statement. “We look forward to working with our syndicate of manufacturing, content creation and distribution partners to uncover opportunities and alliances across a range of vertical markets as we take our technology to the next phase.”
Conceptual rendering of Light Field Lab’s technology for rendering a three-dimensional image in front of a viewer.
Light Field Lab
Light Field Lab was founded in 2017 by Jon Karafin, Brendan Bevensee and Ed Ibe, three veterans of Lytro Cinema, the ill-fated start-up that debuted a cinema camera based on light-field technology at NAB 2016 before vanishing from the face of the earth early last year.
Today’s news suggests the company’s is work is progressing more or less as originally planned — in an April 2017 interview with StudioDaily, Karafin said the company hoped to spend one to two years developing a small-scale prototype that would help it secure venture financing to develop the technology on a larger scale. Late last year, the company announced a technology partnership with OTOY along with commitments from Endeavor and Roddenberry Entertainment to develop original content for holographic display.
