Creating Content for Emerging Light Field Displays

Abstract: In sharp contrast to today’s commodity servers and heavily virtualized clouds, Aclectic Systems Inc. (Aclectic), narrows our focus and customizes our hardware, system and application software explicitly for physically based simulations and Light Field productions. Aclectic is developing PolymathTM, a hardware / software integrated supercomputing appliance and an aggregate “Edge Visual Cloud” we call CirrusFXTM. To drive and provide a running context for our development efforts, Aclectic is creating an independent short film as well as an immersive interactive experience we call “The Blue Marble”. A key element of our production is that it is being designed from first principles as an exploratory vehicle for understanding the creative, technical and production implications of how to create interactive content explicitly for emerging light field displays.

Our presentation will start with an overview of the RED Hydrogen One phone and its display. We will walk through the production workflow, as well as the lessons we learned from creating content explicitly for the RED Hydrogen One and its h4v format. Next, we will extrapolate this experience to how a future hand-held Light Field display may evolve to a 16xHD view version as we move towards 5G cellular networks and 8K mobile OLED displays. We will finish our presentation with an analysis of the storage, bandwidth, networking and compute requirements for content created for a tiled Light Field Display that can be used for future immersive interactive experiences.

Speaker: Yahya H. Mirza, CEO / CTO, Aclectic Systems Inc.

Bio: Yahya H. Mirza’s original background was aeronautical engineering and was initially employed by Battelle Research Labs. His experience at NASA Ames in 1989, simulating the hypersonic aerodynamics of waveriders on the Cray-YMP, brought him to an important realization. A clear need exists for integrated software tools that enable creative exploration, utilizing a combination of procedural techniques, physical simulation and domain specific languages. To pursue this direction, through his first start-up in 1991, Yahya initiated a cooperative research and development agreement with Wright Patterson Air Force Base. This experience was followed by nearly four years as a visiting researcher in the UIUC Smalltalk Research Group. Through his follow-on start-up attempts, Yahya has worked on system software or 3D simulation / graphics-based application software projects for Spatial Technologies, Microsoft, Cat Daddy Games, Source Dynamics, Pixar Animation Studios, Small Machines Inc., Xilinx and most recently Intel