A Newfoundland company just convinced Lockheed Martin Canada to bet another $11.7 million on a tabletop that projects a battlefield in 3D, no glasses required.

Wally Haas did not set out to build holograms. He was a chip designer for optical telecom networks, the guts of long-haul internet infrastructure connecting St. John's to London and New York. He sold that company, Avalon Microelectronics, to Intel in 2010 and became a senior director there. It did not stick.

"They didn't really move at the pace that I liked moving at," Haas said. 

Then he watched Tony Stark manipulate a floating hologram on screen in Iron Man 2 and started wondering whether that was actually possible. He found a used copy of Holographic Imaging, a text out of the MIT Media Lab, which argued the physics were conceptually simple: produce individual rays of light, but billions of them, and control every one through networking.

"The chips that I designed, they weren't in the visible light spectrum, but they were still light," Haas said. 

Optical switches already dealt with the bandwidth. He had the money and, evidently, the nerve. He founded Avalon Holographics in January 2015 to find out what was possible.

What Avalon builds is exactly what it sounds like: a hologram, "the Star Wars chess table." 

The formal term is light field holography. Rather than simulating a 3D object on a flat screen, the display reproduces the actual rays of light a real object would emit, so the image has genuine depth, no headset required. Walk around it and you see around the object, the same way you would in the room.

The current model, called the Novak, is a tabletop unit about three feet square, with roughly 40 inches of hologram depth. Push it past 16 inches and the image starts to fog.

It is also, in Haas's own words, "eye-wateringly expensive." 

A single unit runs in the range of $5 million, a price that puts it out of reach for nearly everyone except organizations for whom a bad decision is catastrophically expensive. That is defence. It is also trauma medicine, where a surgeon, a radiologist and a clinician need to look at the same organ from the same angle at the same moment.

Lockheed Martin Canada has been working with Avalon since 2020, and the relationship has now moved through three funding phases: an initial $6.1-million Phase 1 investment, a $5.6-million contract, and a newly announced $11.7-million total commitment disclosed September 9. 

A unit is already installed at Lockheed Martin's Center for Innovation, the Lighthouse, where the company uses it for mission planning and wargaming.

Haas offered one example: engineers fed the display National Transportation Safety Board footage from an aircraft that overshot a runway, reconstructed the flight path from air traffic control data, and rendered the aircraft's altitude, speed and final approach as a 3D scene. 

The same trick works for terrain: sightlines, weapons ranges, electronic warfare envelopes and radio signal coverage can all be layered onto a holographic map so a room full of planners sees identical spatial information at the same time.

"Our investment in Avalon Holographics will enable continued innovation from an incredible Canadian company," said Stephen Isaacs, general manager of Lockheed Martin Canada Rotary and Mission Systems, "supporting employment opportunities across the country and contributing to the development of critical new training and simulation capabilities."

The investment also does double duty for Lockheed Martin Canada, helping the company satisfy Industrial and Technological Benefits obligations tied to the River-class destroyer program and the Victoria-class submarine command and control system contract.

Haas knows that a $5 million hologram has a narrow customer base. Getting that cost down is the entire roadmap. Avalon is now fundraising for what it calls a tiled flat-panel display, aimed at eliminating the projector-based architecture that drives most of the current unit's cost.

Haas said there is no fundamental physics reason the technology has to be this expensive, and that switching to in-house manufacturing of the display tiles could cut costs by 90 per cent.

Haas argues the customer list at a lower price stops being defence primes and research labs and starts looking like Disney and Universal, a broader swath of hospitals, and eventually something closer to consumer electronics. 

Haas puts the addressable market at $150 billion a year.

"I think we can be the next Apple," he said, "but it's just going to take a long time."

On the defence side, cost and size are also the barrier to getting the display out of a division-level operations centre and onto something deployed. 

"If you want to put it on a vehicle, it needs to get cheaper," Haas said, "and the quality needs to go up a little bit."

Primary development work on the flat-panel project will happen in St. John's and Edmonton, according to Lockheed Martin Canada, supporting engineering, software and manufacturing jobs in both cities.

Avalon has spent 10 years and two rounds of Lockheed Martin financing proving that a real-time, glasses-free 3D display can do something a screen cannot: put a room full of people inside the same picture at the same time. 

Whether it becomes ordinary office equipment or stays a boutique tool for people who cannot afford to misread a battlefield or a CT scan now comes down to a manufacturing problem, not a physics one.

"Nothing else has come even close to what we've been able to produce," Haas said. "We just have to stick with it."