Light Field Lab

Light Field Lab
Information
Industry	Holographic display technology
Founded	2017
Founder	Jon Karafin, Brendan Bevensee, Ed Ibe
Headquarters	San Jose, California, United States
Notable Personnel	Jon Karafin (CEO)
Products	SolidLight holographic display systems, WaveTracer rendering software
Website	https://www.lightfieldlab.com

Light Field Lab (Light Field Lab, Inc.) is an American display technology company in San Jose, California, that develops SolidLight, a modular holographic display system meant to form 3D objects in mid-air that viewers can see without a headset or glasses. It was founded in 2017 by Jon Karafin, Brendan Bevensee and Ed Ibe, three former members of the team at Lytro that built the Lytro Cinema light field camera system.

The company's displays are a light field approach to headset-free 3D: instead of tracking the viewer, each panel sends different light rays in different directions, so that people around the screen see the object from their own position. In 2018 Karafin described the goal as building "the core modules to enable a real-world Holodeck". By early 2023 Light Field Lab had raised 85 million US dollars across a seed round, a Series A and a Series B, and in December 2024 it launched the SolidLight: Holographic and SolidLight: Volumetric product configurations.

Reviewed 6 October 2026. Founders and roles, seed/Series A/Series B amounts and investors, OTOY partnership quotes, UploadVR 2018 demo, SolidLight 2021 and Dec 2024 launch specs, TIME 2022 award and archived company site checked against the cited sources. About review dates.

History

Founding and seed funding

Light Field Lab announced its launch on 18 April 2017, ahead of a presentation at the NAB Show in Las Vegas. At launch, Jon Karafin was chief executive officer, Brendan Bevensee was chief technology officer and Ed Ibe was vice president of engineering. Karafin had been head of light field video at Lytro and earlier vice president of production technology at RealD; Bevensee had been a lead engineer at Lytro and holds a Ph.D. in experimental particle physics from the University of Pennsylvania; Ibe had been lead hardware engineer on Lytro Cinema. In a 2018 profile, fxguide reported that Karafin had also worked at Digital Domain and that the three founders had led the Lytro Cinema technology team.

On 25 January 2018 the company announced a 7 million US dollar seed round led by Khosla Ventures and Sherpa Capital, with R7 Partners among the other participants. Its prototype display modules then measured 6 by 4 inches. The company said production modules would measure 2 by 2 feet and could be joined into walls up to 100 feet wide for venues. fxguide described the prototype, called R150, as a 150-megapixel module with a 16K by 10K pixel array, and reported that, according to testing not done by Light Field Lab itself, the displays of that stage worked well to around 60 degrees.

OTOY partnership and Series A

In October 2018 Light Field Lab and the rendering company OTOY announced a partnership on a pipeline for creating holographic content and showing it on Light Field Lab panels, using OTOY's ORBX format. UploadVR reported that content for the displays was in development by Rod Roddenberry, an executive producer of Star Trek: Discovery, and by Endeavor CEO Ari Emanuel, an OTOY investor. In the UploadVR report, Karafin listed what the approach avoids compared with headsets: "No headgear, no head-tracking, no vergence/accommodation conflict, no motion latency, no headaches or eye strain". OTOY founder Jules Urbach said that if the displays could be tiled like LED walls, "the holodeck is viable".

UploadVR's Ian Hamilton saw a prototype in November 2018. The demo showed a holographic monarch butterfly in a viewing volume about 2 inches deep, best seen from roughly 1 meter away. Hamilton reported correct parallax as he moved his head, and wrote that a magnifying lens passed through the image behaved as it would with a real object, while image quality fell off outside the optimal viewing cone. He compared the experience to his first Oculus Rift demo in late 2012.

In August 2019 Light Field Lab closed a 28 million US dollar Series A led by Bosch Venture Capital and Taiwania Capital. Other named investors included Samsung, Verizon Ventures, Comcast, Liberty Global Ventures, NTT Docomo Ventures and HELLA Ventures, alongside Khosla Ventures, Alumni Ventures Group, R7 Partners and Acme Capital. GamesBeat reported that the company then had 14 employees and about a dozen contractors, and that it would first target large location-based entertainment venues before an eventual consumer version.

SolidLight and Series B

On 7 October 2021 the company unveiled SolidLight, which it called the highest-resolution holographic display platform ever designed. The release described 28-inch SolidLight Surface panels with 2.5 billion pixels each, a density of 10 billion pixels per square meter, and configurations that could scale past hundreds of billions of pixels. Light Field Lab began taking applications for pre-orders of the first production systems and said pricing would be competitive with premium fine-pitch video walls. On 30 November 2022 the company announced that SolidLight had been named to TIME's list of the Best Inventions of 2022.

On 8 February 2023 Light Field Lab closed a 50 million US dollar Series B. NCSOFT led the round, and Corning, Gates Frontier, LG Tech Ventures and OTOY joined as new investors; existing backers Khosla Ventures, Taiwania Capital and the venture capital arms of Samsung, Verizon, Bosch, Forvia and Liberty Global also took part. The company said the money would fund the productization of SolidLight for enterprise and location-based entertainment uses, and it introduced Defy, a line of interactive experiences built with its WaveTracing software, which integrates with standard content engines. GamesBeat put the company's total funding at 85 million US dollars and reported 25 full-time staff, 25 contractors and a 15,000-square-foot manufacturing space in San Jose that could expand to 35,000 square feet. The first Defy experience was titled "Space and Time".

Commercial launch

On 5 December 2024 Light Field Lab launched two product configurations, SolidLight: Holographic and SolidLight: Volumetric, at an invitation-only event developed with the SETI Institute, a themed "First Contact" experience in which guests met an extraterrestrial character formed from light. Holographic installations are built to order and driven by an array of media servers; Volumetric systems were announced as available with delivery in 2025 and run from a single computer. The company said SolidLight demonstrations were hosted only at its San Jose headquarters, by appointment. SETI Institute president and CEO Bill Diamond called the displays "clearly the precursor to Star Trek's Holodeck". GamesBeat reported that the demo content was created with Unreal Engine and Maya, that one configuration used more than 60 GPUs, and that Karafin expected lower-bandwidth models in 2025 and more ambitious projects in three to five years.

On the company's website as archived in October 2025, the December 2024 launch was still the latest press release listed.

Funding rounds

Round	Announced	Amount	Led by	Source
Seed	25 January 2018	7 million US dollars	Khosla Ventures, Sherpa Capital
Series A	August 2019	28 million US dollars	Bosch Venture Capital, Taiwania Capital
Series B	8 February 2023	50 million US dollars	NCSOFT

Products

Light Field Lab sells SolidLight as a turnkey system. According to its website, a system includes the SolidLight modular panels, computing hardware (servers, GPUs, synchronization and networking), WaveTracer rendering software and plugins for existing content workflows, plus support and maintenance.

Product	Introduced	Description
R150 prototype module	2018	6 by 4 inch prototype module; fxguide reported 150 megapixels and a 16K by 10K pixel array
SolidLight Surface panel	October 2021	28-inch modular self-emissive panel with 2.5 billion pixels; 10 billion pixels per square meter
SolidLight: Holographic	December 2024	Multi-panel built-to-order system; 10 billion pixels per square meter (nominal); wide-gamut 10-bit HDR at 60 Hz
SolidLight: Volumetric	December 2024	Multi-panel system forming floating multi-planar objects; 100 million pixels per square meter (nominal); delivery from 2025
WaveTracer	2021	Real-time rendering software and plugins for SolidLight content
Defy	February 2023	Interactive SolidLight experiences; the first was "Space and Time"

Technology

In the company's description, a SolidLight panel has three layers: high-performance FPGA electronics and display controllers, a photonics array with a "nanoparticle polymer fused surface energy relay", and a "complex phaseguide modulation surface". Earlier descriptions from 2019 spoke of a directly emissive flat-panel surface coupled with waveguides that modulate collimated light rays to produce a very large number of viewing angles. In its 2018 explainer, fxguide described the screen conceptually as a series of tiny glass balls, each showing a pixel that is correct only for one viewing direction, so the display sends many views out at once without tracking anyone.

Objects can appear in front of or behind the panel surface. Because no eyewear or head tracking is involved, several people can look at the same object together. Karafin presented this as an advantage over head-mounted displays, citing the absence of vergence-accommodation conflict and motion latency.

XR work

Light Field Lab does not make headsets. It describes its roadmap as a way to "seamlessly merge real and virtual worlds together", and its CEO has contrasted the approach with headset-based virtual reality and augmented reality systems. Its stated early markets are location-based entertainment, enterprise installations, museums and theme parks rather than home use. Its content pipeline relies on real-time tools also used for XR, such as Unreal Engine, and OTOY's rendering and streaming technology.

See also

• Light field display
• Holographic display
• Lytro
• OTOY
• Volumetric display
• Holodeck
• Looking Glass Factory
• Leia Inc.