Avalon Holographics

Avalon Holographics
Information
Industry	Holographic and light field displays
Founded	2015
Founder	Wally Haas
Headquarters	St. John's, Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada
Notable Personnel	Wally Haas (founder and president), Russ Baker (co-founder)
Products	NOVAC holographic table display
Website	https://avalonholographics.com

Avalon Holographics (Avalon Holographics Inc.) is a Canadian company that develops glasses-free holographic light field displays. It was founded in 2015 by Wally Haas in St. John's, Newfoundland and Labrador, where it is still headquartered, and it runs an R&D and fabrication lab in Edmonton, Alberta. Its first commercial product is NOVAC, a 40-inch table display that lets several people look at the same 3D image from different angles at once, without glasses, headsets or tracking systems.

The provincial government has described its technology as used in sectors such as defence, aerospace and medical technology. In September 2026 it announced a C$11.7 million commitment from Lockheed Martin Canada to develop table-top prototypes and large flat-panel light field displays. Avalon's displays are a shared-viewing alternative to VR headsets and AR glasses: the 3D image is formed in the room rather than inside one person's eyewear.

Reviewed 14 October 2026. Every dated fact, figure, spec, quote and attribution checked against the cited company releases, NL and ACOA government pages, Kongsberg, Altera, CFI, GamesBeat, Auganix, Sixteen:Nine, JPR, VentureBeat and the US 10,244,230 patent record. About review dates.

History

Founding

Before Avalon Holographics, Wally Haas founded Avalon Microelectronics, a supplier of optical transport network (OTN) intellectual property for FPGAs and ASICs. Altera announced its acquisition on 14 December 2010, at which point Haas was its founder and chief technology officer. GamesBeat reported that Haas then worked at Intel, which later bought Altera, for four years before starting Avalon Holographics in 2015. The company's 2020 announcements list Haas as president and co-founder and Russ Baker as co-founder and vice president of business development.

The company's early work was nanoscale device fabrication. A 2018 profile by the Canada Foundation for Innovation said Avalon had 40 employees, nine of whom worked on holographic devices at the University of Alberta's nanoFab cleanroom in Edmonton. It also used the University of Waterloo's electron-beam lithography equipment to pattern devices about 100 microns across. Haas said of the Alberta facility, "Without it we'd shut down."

Prototypes and defence projects

On 25 August 2020, Avalon unveiled a 29-inch first-generation prototype, a development system it had designed with partners in defence, medical imaging and industrial design. Haas said in the announcement that "natural 3D light field displays" would change how visual content is produced, viewed and understood. In the same announcement, a GE Healthcare director said that because Avalon's hardware and software work with standard geometry files, the display could pair with GE's AW 3D Suite imaging software. The company also said the Government of Canada, through the Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency (ACOA), had invested more than C$5 million in it since 2017, and that it had taken part in three projects under the IDEaS (Innovation for Defence Excellence and Security) programme, which the Department of National Defence runs. That same year it received an Epic Games MegaGrant to research ray tracing in Unreal Engine 4 for multi-view displays.

In September 2021, Kongsberg Geospatial and Avalon announced an IDEaS-funded project to build a holographic tactical display for passive sonar tracking. The system combined passive sonar data with 3D bathymetric data. Kongsberg Geospatial supplied the rendering software and Avalon the display hardware. The first phase ran until November 2021, and a later phase was meant to port the software to Avalon's next-generation display. Also in September 2021, the Newfoundland and Labrador government gave Avalon a non-repayable C$98,252 to expand business development in the United States and Canada, including a medical technology collaboration with the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. The government said the company had more than 50 employees at the time.

In January 2023 Avalon was selected for LG NOVA's second annual Mission for the Future programme, a search that drew 2,170 submissions.

NOVAC launch

In October 2024 the provincial Department of Industry, Energy and Technology announced C$1,023,575 toward a transportable version of NOVAC, with the company contributing C$1,753,065. The government said the existing table was hard to move, which made it difficult to take to trade shows or ship to customers, and that Avalon held more than 50 patents. In January 2025, Sixteen:Nine reported that two NOVAC units were running: one at the St. John's headquarters and one at the University of Central Florida in Orlando. Haas told the publication that current units cost millions of dollars, that the near-term aim was hundreds of thousands of dollars per unit, and that the long-term aim was a price in line with premium consumer televisions.

Avalon launched NOVAC commercially in May 2025. At launch it said it held 61 patents, had raised US$65 million, and was raising a further US$50 million for an OLED-based successor built from 6-inch flat tiles that can be combined into larger displays. GamesBeat reported that more than 100 people worked at the company, that it had built four holographic prototypes (sold as research devices, including to the Canadian Armed Forces), and that Haas expected the funded successor in about four years, with roughly ten times the performance at about 10 percent of the current cost.

Lockheed Martin Canada investment

On 18 September 2026, Avalon announced a C$11.7 million commitment from Lockheed Martin Canada. The total is made up of a new C$5.6 million contract and C$6.1 million in earlier Phase 1 funding. The money supports table-top prototypes and large flat-panel light field displays, with work in St. John's and Edmonton. The two companies have worked together since 2020, and an Avalon display is installed at The Lighthouse, Lockheed Martin's Center for Innovation. The investment counts toward Lockheed Martin Canada's obligations under Canada's Industrial and Technological Benefits Policy for the River-class destroyer programme and the Victoria-class Submarine Command and Control System contract. Auganix reported the commitment on 12 October 2026. On 9 October 2026, the company received the Atlantic Canada Aerospace and Defence Association's Innovation Leader Award at DEFSEC Atlantic 2026 in Halifax. The announcement gave its headcount as about 80.

Technology

Avalon's displays are light field displays. They do not show a flat image. Each point on the display surface sends light of different colour and intensity in different directions, so viewers at different positions see the same 3D object from different angles. Avalon calls its directional emitter a "HoloPixel" and says it is conceptually similar to a hogel (a holographic element made with microlens techniques), but steers light with directional elements instead. Its US patent 10,244,230, "Directional pixel for multiple view display" (filed March 2017, granted March 2019, inventors including Haas), describes pixels made of nano- or micro-scale subpixels. Each subpixel holds a light emitter in an optical microcavity that collimates the light, and guiding surfaces send the beam out at a set angle. An array of these pixels forms a multiple-view light field display. Kongsberg Geospatial's 2021 sonar announcement described the display as using millions of hogels, and quoted Russ Baker saying that Avalon's Raydiance Engine would be paired with Kongsberg's TerraLens software.

"NOVAC" stands for "No Vergence-Accommodation Conflict," according to Jon Peddie Research. The name refers to the vergence-accommodation conflict, the mismatch between where the eyes converge and where they focus that affects stereoscopic headsets. Avalon has described its displays as avoiding the nausea and fatigue associated with VR and AR devices. Haas told Sixteen:Nine that viewers are "literally seeing the rays that would be produced as if that object was real." The publication reported a data rate of about 5 terabits per second and mechanical tolerances of tens of microns held over a metre or more.

Products

NOVAC

NOVAC is a table display. The company lists these specifications:

Specification	NOVAC (manufacturer figures)
Display size	40 in
Resolution	63,888 x 69,696 pixels
Aspect ratio	1:1 (square)
Active pixels	4.5 billion
Viewing angle	74 degrees x 74 degrees
Frame rate	30 fps (as reported by GamesBeat)
Display dimensions	36 x 36 x 41 in (l x w x h)
Display weight	975 lb
Power input	3-phase 208 V 60 Hz AC, 6.7 kW
Rendering hardware	Included GPU server (AceleMax DGS-428G2); liquid chiller supplied by the customer
Software	HighGround battlespace viewer, customized Unreal Engine, Unity plugin, RaySlicer medical imaging viewer, API with DirectX 12 examples

At launch, Avalon said NOVAC was optimized for NVIDIA RTX GPUs, ran on Windows and Linux, and worked with Unreal Engine, Unity and NVIDIA Omniverse. It listed support for OBJ, FBX, glTF, 3D Tiles, DICOM and GIS formats. GamesBeat reported that the image has 6-8 inches of depth, is built from 12 tiles, and is driven by a three-rack server with eight GPUs and water cooling. It also listed photogrammetry and Gaussian splatting content among the supported inputs. The ACOA describes NOVAC as projector-based.

Planned products

Avalon is developing a flat-panel holographic display, which the ACOA's 2025 profile mentions. At the NOVAC launch the company described this as an OLED-based successor made of 6-inch flat tiles, aimed at digital twin environments, public exhibitions and installations. The Lockheed Martin Canada funding announced in 2026 covers both table-top prototypes and large flat-panel light field displays. As of October 2026, the company had not announced a release date for a flat-panel product.

Applications and relation to XR

Avalon's main markets are defence (training, simulation, mission planning and situational awareness), medicine, space, manufacturing and emergency management. Its approach competes with head-worn virtual reality and augmented reality for 3D visualisation and collaboration. In a January 2026 VentureBeat piece presented by Avalon, Haas argued that VR isolates its user and that AR content is visible only to its wearer, while a light field display lets a group see the same 3D content in shared physical space without equipment. He predicted that holographic light field displays would become the primary interface, with AR and VR in niche roles. GamesBeat named Light Field Lab as a competitor. Other companies making glasses-free 3D displays include Looking Glass Factory and Leia Inc.

Funding

Avalon has received public funding from federal and provincial programmes, defence contracts and private investment. Published totals differ by source and date.

Date	Source	Amount	Purpose or note
2017-2020	Government of Canada (ACOA)	More than C$5 million (cumulative, per the company)	Investment since 2017, as stated in the August 2020 announcement
2020	Epic Games MegaGrant	Not disclosed	Ray tracing in Unreal Engine 4 for multi-view displays
27 September 2021	Government of Newfoundland and Labrador	C$98,252 (non-repayable)	Business development in the US and Canada
8 October 2024	Government of Newfoundland and Labrador (IET)	C$1,023,575	Transportable NOVAC table
January 2025	Cumulative (Sixteen:Nine)	$50 million in investment (currency not stated)	As reported by Sixteen:Nine
May 2025	Cumulative (company)	US$65 million raised	Company figure at the NOVAC launch; a further US$50 million round was under way
18 September 2026	Lockheed Martin Canada	C$11.7 million (C$5.6 million new contract plus C$6.1 million Phase 1)	Table-top prototypes and large flat-panel light field displays

See also

• Light field display
• Holographic display
• Autostereoscopy
• Volumetric display
• Light Field Lab
• Looking Glass Factory