Recently Euclideon, an Australian IT company, has announced that they made a prototype hologram table. This news has delighted a lot of readers, especially those who have watched “Star Wars” and “Iron Man”.

Who are we? Our IT-company Nettle is a developer of a hologram screen with five years’ experience and we presented our hologram table, NettleBox, for the first time at TechCrunch Disrupt back in 2013.

Why did we decide to write this article? Only a small number of people are informed about the market for hologram tables and almost all of them are working with this market. We want to increase awareness and share our knowledge with the masses.

To whom is this article addressed? Entrepreneurs who want to start or have already started similar business, investors who cannot decide if it’s appropriate market for funding, and resellers, content developers, and everyone else who might be interested in visual technologies.

About what is this article? We would like to tell you how content is being made, how different technologies work, who the main customers are, and also what’s important so that the illusion of a holographic image is maintained.

Content creation and technology

The market for virtual holograms can be attributed to the incredibly fast growing market for mixed reality. According to Technavio’s forecast, it has been estimated at approximately $1,12 billion by 2022, rising at a significant CAGR (compound annual growth rate) of 75% during the period of 2016 to 2022.

Technavio’s report

The manufacture of a holographic table is a serialized process. The most individual part is the content. Its development is essentially similar to making content for virtual and augmented reality.

First of all, 3D artists make lower polygon models in 3Ds Max, which are optimized for real-time. Many customers say:“Oh, we already have a 3D model,” but usually it turns out that they have a high polygon count. It places a lot of load on the system when rendering. For the comfortable viewing of objects the FPS must be at least 60 for each eye, thus we have 8 ms to render each frame.

The main illusion of the holographic screen is the image behaves like a real object when someone walk around it, wearing 3D active shutter glasses with special IR markers. A drop in FPS will break the illusion and lose the “wow” effect. In order not to break it, it is important to consider a few things. First, the most essential component is stable tracking. Second, the system latency is very important. You can’t just display a picture on the TV because TVs have a very high latency (from 30 to 120 ms) due to the post-process of images. For example, a very powerful camera can be attached that allows you to track with a very high FPS, but if the screen suffers latency issues then the image will lag.

In the NettleBox system a specially developed signal processing board manages the LCD-matrix and a stream of frames is displayed from the graphics card with minimum latency, less than 1 ms.

Euclideon’s latency is not known, but we expect to see a low latency as well

The next step after modeling is to import the models into a game engine. Initially we had to decide between Unity and Unreal Engine. The Unreal Engine, one of the most popular today, had no a suitable licensing system for us. Unity had an apparent advantage: all the elements are written in the C# programming language, which is more convenient than C++. Furthermore, 59% of VR developers use the same game engine to create applications.

Game engines

In the last few years the infrastructure development of the content has changed in a positive way. The market has grown. Today, a lot of developers understand what Unity is, what are the limitations, what are the possibilities of real-time graphics. Thanks to this, the customer now has more choice. Usually our team performs turnkey projects, providing both hardware and content, but the companies that buy NettleBox have the possibility to order their content from any studio. In this case, we provide the manuals, tracking libraries, and the interface for our cameras.

Multi-user scenarios

The concept of Euclideon, a multi-user hologram table is of great interest, because according to the creators, up to 4 users may use the table simultaneously.

Now the main stumbling block to creating a multi-user table is the holographic display: the rate of the output frames of today’s screens is limited to 120 frames/s. This is enough for comfortable viewing by one user, but not for a large number.

There are two potential options for implementing multi-user scenario:

Increase the rate of the output frames. In this case, you need to understand that the load on the rendering multiplies, depending on the number of viewers.

120 frames might be shared among a number of users. But that is really uncomfortable (we mentioned above that the FPS needs to be at least 60 for each eye).

Customers

Bruce Dell, Euclideon’s CEO, considers that their holographic table can become a kind of “a male Gucci bag” for millionaires and people will buy them instead of (or in addition to) a Ferrari.

“Wow! I want it!” “Well, why do you want it?” “I don’t know! I’ll think of that later!” says Dell, mimicking the potential buyers’ words.

In addition to the entertainment component, such screens have a clear B2B niche. Today the customers are developers who use the technology for the presentation of the housing complexes, as well as a sales tool. The technology gives good results: according to research from one of our customers, 94% of users left positive feedback about the technology. According to the same data, presentations using a holographic maquette reduce the time required for a demonstration by 10–20 minutes.

Industrial companies/corporations want to see complex engineering projects that can be considered in detail and dynamically. Holographic engineering models can take their place on exhibition stands and in corporate museums.

Revenue and sales cycle

Average bill and revenue

The average bill for NettleBox and content is $ 50,000. We get 54.22% of the revenue from hardware, 38.11% is for a share of the content, 7.67% is the share for the rent of our hardware. In 2015, government orders for Nettle products and services were responsible for 41.4% of revenue, and commercial ones were responsible for 58.6%. In 2016, the orders from the government and commercial sectors were approximately equal, 47.7% and 52.3% respectively.

Nettle’s revenue

Time

The average length of a cycle from initial contact until the product is delivered varies from 1.5 months to 3 months. As a rule, a single meeting or call is not enough. We set up a meeting with a representative’s specialist and then with a manager or head of a company. 1.5 months is often spent agreeing the details of the requirements. Most of the time is spent on discussing the content because it’s individual to each client and demands a lot of attention.

Following this, preparation of documents takes about a month. We have a contract template, but in large companies the contract goes through multiple departments and usually they thoroughly check all the points and correct some things, so it takes at least another 2 weeks. The sales cycle is extended for government customers even more as it requires additional procurement procedures. When working with contractors, you need to consider the seasonal factor: it is known that most budget orders occurs at the end of the financial year.

The final part is delivery. It takes about 3 days. For other countries than Russia this process takes longer as the equipment is subject to customs clearance. Once we shipped a NettleBox to Australia and the plasma screen was broken in an accident during transit. We sent a new table to replace the broken one, so in this case, it’s important to have a good customer support team that can respond quickly toward such situations.

Conclusion

We have made a short overview of the processes and difficulties which exist if you’re a hologram table developer. What will happen when Euclideon have their hologram table on the market for sale? Will it blow everyone’s mind? Euclideon have made a good step forward with a difficult technology. We predict that with the emergence of Euclideon’s hardware, other companies will start to manufacture similar products and create content to take a piece of the pie.