Why haven't volumetric displays taken off?

I see volumetric displays at conferences, in advertising, and super niche use cases.

It's usually something like the Voxon or Hypervsn, or some lesser known fog display.

It looks cool in person. Not sure if it's too expensive, hard to use, or just not solving a real problem.

But I'm curious why hasn't this stuff taken off?

Are volumetric displays a dead space? Is anyone on HN working on this stuff or seen anything interesting in volumetric display tech?

3 comments of 6

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JohnFen 1mo ago ↗

My guess is that this type of display is inherently a niche product. It would be terrible as a general-purpose monitor replacement, for instance.

X-Ryl669 1mo ago ↗

Because it's missing (interesting) content maybe?

Content is a bandwidth issue. If you need so much bandwidth for a flat, planar 4k stream, how many more do you need for a 100 planes (still pretty flat IMHO) for depth ? Or 1000 planes ?

Maybe it can explode with Gaussian Splats, since it's a convenient way to save a volumetric scene, but, until now, no one made a Gaussian Splats video, so I wonder the bandwidth and processing power required for these too.

apothegm 1mo ago ↗

Bulky? Costly? Software doesn’t support it? How much do they cost, anyway?

I bet they’re also absolutely awful to read/write text or code on. And the quality for 3D uses is still mediocre.

I could imagine their having an application in CAD and 3D modeling if the price were right. But the software tooling would first need to be able to support the display. And I doubt that’s a dimension (ha!) that would be worth their while to compete on (bit of a chicken/egg problem).