MIT's Object-Based Media holography group closed in August 2020

What you see

There is no single display to look at here; the subject is a now-closed university research programme and its paper trail. The group's own overview page states plainly that “Object-Based Media was active from January 1989 to August 2020” and that the group “is no longer active,” correcting any assumption that this is an ongoing lab a visitor could tour today; the page exists to document, in its own words, “background on some of the people and projects that were associated with this research.”

How it works

The overview page tags the group's research with topics including “#holography,” and the group's publications page lists dozens of papers, led largely by V. Michael Bove Jr., on mechanisms named specifically in their own titles: guided-wave acousto-optic holographic video displays, anisotropic leaky-mode spatial light modulators, photorefractive-polymer holographic displays updated by direct optical fringe writing, and near-to-eye electroholography. Those titles describe several distinct computational and electro-optic holographic-video mechanisms developed over decades, not one unchanging technology, spanning work described elsewhere in this archive's coverage of Stephen Benton's earlier rainbow-hologram research, of which this group was an institutional successor.

Viewing conditions and limits

Because the group is inactive, none of its listed projects should be described as an ongoing, currently viewable display; the publications page provides paper titles and some downloadable PDFs but, in the portion retrieved for this entry, no consolidated statement of which prototypes still exist, still function, or were ever viewed outside a lab setting. The overview page directs visitors seeking current Media Lab display research to a separate, present-day research section rather than to this group's own now-static pages.

What it is not

This is not an active laboratory continuing to publish new holographic-display results under this name, contrary to a description of it as an “ongoing research programme” without qualification; the group's own page dates its closure to August 2020. It is also not a single project or device; “Object-Based Media” and its predecessor Spatial Imaging Group name span three decades and dozens of separate publications on different holographic and 3D-display mechanisms, not one technology that can be evaluated as a whole.

• Is a cited MIT holographic-display result attributed to this group's active years, or misdated to the present?
• Does the cited publication describe a working prototype, a proposed method, or a review of the field?
• Is the underlying mechanism named specifically, given how many distinct holographic-video methods this group alone produced?

Read as an archive rather than a live lab, the group's own pages are most useful for tracing which specific holographic-display mechanisms MIT researchers pursued and when, not for describing any current, ongoing MIT holography programme under this name.