The holodeck, a place where you can recreate any environment, is one of those signature pieces of Star Trek technology, like warp drive and transporters. Now a group of companies is working to make something like the holodeck a reality, with some help from Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry’s son.

Making a real holodeck

Roddenberry Entertainment, owned by Rod Roddenberry, son of Gene Roddenberry, is teaming up with a number of technology companies working to make the Star Trek holodeck a reality. The partnership will leverage Light Field Lab’s revolutionary headgear-free holographic displays and OTOY’s ORBX Technology, the industry’s first open source and royalty-free format for rendering media and real-time graphics on Light Field Lab’s holographic display panels.

Original holographic content for the new system is in active development, spearheaded by Ari Emanuel, CEO of Endeavor, and Rod Roddenberry, CEO of Roddenberry Entertainment, and also an executive producer on Star Trek: Discovery.

“The concept of the Holodeck was extremely important to my father as well as the Star Trek Universe,” said Rod Roddenberry about his late father, Gene Roddenberry, the creator of Star Trek. “I want to see Star Trek’s technologies made real, and for the very first time, now believe that a real Holodeck is no longer limited to science fiction. Although it’s early days, my father would be beyond excited to know his vision is coming into reality thanks to OTOY’s trailblazing light field rendering, and the revolutionary holographic display systems created at Light Field Lab.”

We’re excited to use this platform to bring true holographic content to Light Field Lab’s displays, which will give consumers unbelievable experiences, without the burden of 3D glasses or VR headsets,” said Emanuel.

Light Field Lab’s initial prototype modules will scale to form larger holographic video walls with hundreds of gigapixels of light field resolution setting the standard for fully immersive holographic experiences. OTOY’s blockchain GPU compute network (RNDR) will provide the scale to make rendering holographic content for these experiences widely available for the first time. Light Field Lab started demonstrating holographic prototypes with OTOY-rendered content earlier this year to leading industry stakeholders including Endeavor, Roddenberry Entertainment and Richard Kerris, former CTO of Lucasfilm and Advisor to OTOY.

Both Light Field Lab and OTOY have committed to bringing these experiences to professional and consumer markets, alongside an end-to-end content creation and distribution ecosystem, with the ultimate shared vision to enable the Star Trek Holodeck. Endeavor-backed holographic experiences will be exhibited in a slate of upcoming projects and campaigns.

For more info, visit lightfieldlab.com.