VividQ

VividQ
Information
Industry	Computer-generated holography, display technology
Founded	2017
Founder	Darran Milne, Roman Pechhacker, SJ Senanayake, Andrzej Kaczorowski, Tom Durrant, Aleksandra Pedraszewska
Headquarters	Cambridge, England
Notable Personnel	Darran Milne (CEO)
Products	CoReality AR, CoReality VR, CoReality HUD, Cobalt HDK
Website	https://www.vividq.com

VividQ is a company in England that is developing software algorithms for holograms' interference pattern generation for near-eye displays. It is in the field of computer-generated hologram technology. The company was founded in 2017 and is headquartered in Cambridge, with an office in Palo Alto, California, and remote teams in Taipei and Tokyo. It grew out of computer-generated holography research at the University of Cambridge's engineering department.

VividQ licenses software and intellectual property, including concept and reference designs, to device makers rather than manufacturing hardware itself. Its technology targets augmented reality and virtual reality headsets, automotive head-up displays and holographic LCD panels. The company presents holography as a way to remove the vergence-accommodation conflict of conventional stereoscopic headsets, because a hologram reproduces the focus cues of a real 3D scene.

Its early near-eye demonstrators had a low field of view.

VividQ's early demonstrators used Texas Instruments DMDs, which are binary amplitude-mode components: each micromirror has only two operational states, "on" and "off". Karl Guttag wrote on his KGOnTech display blog in 2024 that VividQ uses conventional amplitude-modulated LCoS rather than the phase-mode LCoS he had seen in other programmable hologram systems, and that it had moved from Texas Instruments' DLP to a 4K device from JVC.

A demo of VividQ's technology was shown using a TI DLP evaluation unit, with a maximum field of view of about 20 degrees.

VividQ is using fixed foveation. In the 3D waveguide demonstration seen by Display Daily in January 2023, only a relatively small central area of the image was truly holographic (20 degrees of a 50-degree field of view), and a regular stereoscopic image filled the rest.

Reviewed 27 September 2026. Checked all new history, funding, technology, demonstration and product claims against the cited VividQ, Cambridge, Display Daily, KGOnTech, Arm, GamesBeat, Tech Funding News, Electro Optics, Pulse 2.0, Cycling Industry News, TI and JSID sources. About review dates.

History

VividQ dates its founding science to a 2016 result at the University of Cambridge photonics lab. The University of Cambridge Department of Engineering describes the company as founded in 2017 by six co-founders: Andrzej Kaczorowski, whose PhD in photonic systems development under Professor Tim Wilkinson led to the start-up, Darran Milne, Tom Durrant, Roman Pechhacker, Aleksandra Pedraszewska and SJ Senanayake. Milne, the chief executive, holds a PhD in theoretical physics focused on quantum information theory. In a 2025 interview he said the founding work sped up hologram computation "by thousands of times", which made real-time, interactive holograms possible. The company says it filed a patent on its holographic software framework in 2018 and signed its first two OEM customers that year.

In July 2021 VividQ released version 5.0.1 of its SDK, which added a hologram generation algorithm called Triton, and two licensable hardware designs: a patent-pending optical design for speckle reduction and a compact laser-balancing module. In September 2021 it announced a partnership with iView, a projection display and optical module maker based in Hong Kong and Shenzhen, to develop holographic optical modules for automotive and wearable AR displays. By February 2022 the company had grown from its six co-founders to more than 40 full-time employees.

VividQ showed its Alpha Optical Engine Demonstrator, a benchtop system for makers of high-end AR headsets, at SID Display Week 2022 in San Jose. It was the first step of the VividQ Alpha Program, which gives partners access to the company's IP to develop AR devices with holographic displays. At the time, AR Insider reported that the company was aiming first at gaming, where users look at virtual objects up close.

On 17 January 2023 VividQ and the Finnish waveguide maker Dispelix announced a 3D waveguide combiner that can show holographic content at several depths at the same time, together with a commercial partnership to take the design toward mass production. In January 2024 it announced "retina resolution" holograms produced on a 4K LCoS display from JVCKenwood, a company it described as a commercial partner.

In August 2024 VividQ raised a 7.5 million US dollar Series A round led by Foresight Group, with GameTech Ventures and Ruttenberg Gordon Investments joining existing investors. The company said it would use the money for product development and to open a US office with a US-based leader. Electro Optics reported that the round brought VividQ's total funding to more than £22 million. In March 2025 the company showed Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II running on a holographic display. In the November 2025 interview, Milne said VividQ had raised about 29 million US dollars from investors in the UK, Japan and the US, had passed 1 million US dollars in annual revenue in 2024, and had expanded to offices in Tokyo and California.

In September 2026 Cycling Industry News reported that VividQ was running pilots in bike shops in Cambridge. Customers wear lightweight glasses to walk around full-size 3D holograms of bicycles, with hardware the report compared to a home entertainment setup; shops pay a monthly subscription for the software and bike catalog. The company said a room-sized version without glasses was about 12 months away and that it was building a demonstration area in Hemel Hempstead.

Technology

VividQ describes its display pipeline in three stages. Its software computes interference patterns (holograms) from the 3D data of game engines and other content sources. The pattern is written to a spatial light modulator, which modulates reflected light instead of showing an image. The modulator is then lit by a coherent or partially coherent source, such as a laser or LED, to form the 3D image. The company lists support for digital micromirror devices, phase light modulators and liquid crystal on silicon modulators, and states that its algorithms generate holograms in real time at 100 frames per second. Its 2021 SDK announcement said the Triton algorithm works with phase LCoS micro-displays and that the laser-balancing design supports off-the-shelf spatial light modulators.

A 2020 Arm developer blog post described how VividQ cuts the computing cost of computer-generated holography. Instead of treating the scene as individual points, the pipeline sorts it into depth layers, computes diffraction with fast Fourier transforms (FFTs) on the GPU, and uses proprietary depth-level optimization and dynamic layer allocation. Arm credited these methods with a 1000-fold reduction in compute. For a 2048x1536 display, figures from VividQ's chief executive ranged from 7 GFLOP per frame for 2 layers to 42 GFLOP per frame for 16 layers. FFTs accounted for 60-90% of the total compute, and a single 720x1280 slice took 8 ms on a Samsung Galaxy S10. Display Daily reported in 2023 that the holographic demonstrator still needed more GPU power than typical head-mounted displays have, which made it suited to tethered systems with a PC-level GPU.

Standard waveguide combiners expect parallel light rays from a 2D image. A diverging 3D image sent through one produces several overlapping copies at different distances. The VividQ and Dispelix 3D waveguide pairs a modified pupil-replicating waveguide with an algorithm that generates corrective holograms. The companies said it can show content across a focus range from 10 cm to optical infinity at once, that the hardware and software do not work with third-party systems on their own, and that it works with Unity and Unreal Engine. Guttag wrote that he had not expected the holographic nature of the image to survive the gratings of a diffractive waveguide, and that VividQ also showed a full-color hologram lit by a single white LED.

In its January 2024 announcement VividQ said the JVCKenwood 4K LCoS setup produced "acuity-limited retinal resolution holograms with full 3D focus and a large field of view". The company compared its target with 60 pixels per degree, which it gives as the limit of 20/20 adult vision.

VividQ's research staff have also published peer-reviewed work. A 2021 paper in the Journal of the Society for Information Display by Alfred Newman and colleagues at VividQ, with Tim Wilkinson of the University of Cambridge, examined the brightness of holographic AR projectors. The authors estimated that holographic projector efficiencies range from 50% to 0.05%, with an average of 3%. They built a 2% efficient prototype that reached a mean luminance of 30,000 cd/m2 from a 1.78 mW RGB laser module, with peaks above 300,000 cd/m2 for sparse content, and argued that holography can give daylight-viewable AR displays that are intrinsically eye safe.

Displays

VividQ used a TI DMD670S for one of its units.

VividQ has advertised its technology in media using a DLPLCRC900DEVM.

VividQ worked with Dispelix to create holographic waveguides.

The table lists the company's main public demonstrations.

Date	Demonstration	Display hardware	Reported details
May 2022	Alpha Optical Engine Demonstrator (SID Display Week, San Jose)	TI DMD670S	1358 x 800 pixels; 60 PPD; field of view 17.6 degrees horizontal, 10.4 degrees vertical (20.4 degrees diagonal); 2700:1 contrast; 6 mm x 6 mm exit pupil; RGB
January 2023	3D waveguide with Dispelix (demonstrations at VividQ's Cambridge headquarters)	TI DMD; the company said LCoS also works	50-degree field of view, of which 20 degrees holographic; 12 mm x 8 mm eyebox; laser-lit main demo with visible speckle and a second LED-lit system; hand tracking for close-up interaction
January 2024	Retina resolution holograms	JVCKenwood 4K LCoS	Company claims "acuity-limited retinal resolution" with full 3D focus
March 2025	Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II on a holographic display	Not disclosed	Ported through VividQ's Co-Reality development kit without changing the source content; over 100 frames per second
September 2026	Bike retail pilots in Cambridge	Lightweight glasses with home-entertainment-style AV hardware	Full-size 3D bicycle holograms that customers walk around; offered by monthly subscription

For the Call of Duty demonstration, GamesBeat reported that VividQ had no licensing agreement with Activision and had bought the game itself to show what its system could do.

Products and partnerships

VividQ's product pages list CoReality AR, CoReality VR and CoReality HUD, along with the Cobalt HDK hardware development kits for AR and VR gaming headsets. The kits include software libraries and tools, 3D engine plugins, hardware designs covering system architecture, display engine, waveguide and electronics, and documentation and technical support. The company also describes a HoloLCD, a laptop-scale holographic display built from standard LCD panels driven by its software.

When VividQ announced its 2021 funding, it named Arm, Compound Photonics, Himax Technologies and iView Displays as customers and partners. AR Insider's 2022 list of named partners also included Forth Dimension Displays. Tech Funding News reported in 2024 that VividQ had partnered with JVCKenwood to integrate its software and hardware into AR and VR devices, automotive head-up displays and other consumer electronics.

Funding

Date	Round	Amount	Investors
July 2021	Post-seed	£11 million	Led by the University of Tokyo's Innovation Platform (IPC), with Foresight Williams Technology, Miyako Capital, APEX Ventures, R42 Group, Sure Valley Ventures, University of Tokyo Edge Capital (UTEC), Essex Innovation and angel investors
August 2024	Series A	7.5 million US dollars	Led by Foresight Group, with GameTech Ventures, Ruttenberg Gordon Investments and existing investors

See also

• Holography
• Holographic display
• Vergence-accommodation conflict
• Spatial light modulator
• Waveguide display