Not far down the road, your car could have a 3D dashboard

Your next car could have a 3D dashboard — no glasses required.

A startup called Leia, which has already shown a prototype of a 2.2-inch screen that can display holograms, is now working on a 5.5-inch screen that gives a sense of how the technology could look if embedded in things like cars and smartphones.

I saw the larger prototype during a visit to Leia's office in Menlo Park, California. Founder and CEO David Fattal used it to show me several different images that appeared to have a few centimeters of depth, such as a simple digital clock moving against a brick-wall background, a skeletal torso, and a satellite map of Switzerland. I could see the images if I was between 50 centimeters and a meter from the display; otherwise they looked flat. They were in color, though not very bright, and could be viewed from a number of different angles without appearing to break up into the different images of which the hologram is actually composed. Read more...