Jon Karafin has a professional grievance with the word hologram. It has been lent too freely to concert apparitions, glass reflections, spinning LED fans and anything else that looks sufficiently futuristic in a dark room. Those can be clever illusions. They are not, by his optical definition, objects made from correctly reconstructed light.
The distinction is not cocktail-party pedantry. It is the organizing principle of Light Field Lab, the San Jose company Karafin co-founded in 2017 with Brendan Bevensee and Ed Ibe. Their SolidLight system is designed to send dense bundles of rays toward a viewer so that eyes can focus on a digital object at a point in physical space. Move sideways and the perspective changes. Move closer and the object behaves as an object should. No headset chooses the view. No pair of glasses assigns one picture to each eye.
Karafin's sales pitch is often an invitation to mistrust your own fingers. He has said the tell comes when a viewer reaches out to touch a SolidLight object and discovers that it is not there. It is a deliciously inconvenient product demo: success ends with the customer grabbing nothing.
The sculpture that ate the studio
His route to this problem began far from a conventional electronics bench. At Rochester Institute of Technology, Karafin made a graduate thesis called The Seven prerequisites for life. The work treated sculpture as a meeting place for biology, mathematics, energy and light. It was not a modest meeting.
Karafin later recalled spending more than two years living and manufacturing in a 250-square-foot studio. He hand-fabricated tens of thousands of microbial fuel-cell parts. Living yeast cultures converted chemical energy into electricity, helping power a 25-foot-tall, two-ton biomechanical sculpture capable of light, sound and motion. The project was featured in Ripley's Believe It or Not!
The sculpture is the useful beginning of the Karafin story because it removes the false border between his artistic and technical lives. He studied visual arts, film and animation across Ithaca College and RIT. Later job titles would include senior scientist, product director and CEO. Yet the recurring impulse stayed remarkably stable: choose an experience that ought to exist, then negotiate with physics until it does.
“You see with your brain - not your eyes.”
Learning to capture every ray
Karafin entered an industry busy teaching flat pictures to feel deeper. At In-Three, Digital Domain and RealD, his work crossed stereo conversion, visual effects, production technology and operations. He has connected that period to technology and content work on films including Alice in Wonderland, Transformers and The Hobbit. The credits matter less as celebrity ornaments than as evidence of scale. Cinema is where optical ideas meet deadlines, directors, budgets and audiences who notice when an image feels wrong.
At Lytro, Karafin became head of light-field video and a director of product management. The Lytro Cinema system, unveiled at NAB in 2016, captured not merely a flat frame but information about rays moving through a volume. Its public specifications were almost comic in their excess: a 755-megapixel sensor, up to 300 frames per second and torrents of data. Karafin joked in one interview that the first camera was closer to a couch than a suitcase.
The size bought creative freedom. A conventional camera commits focus, aperture and other optical choices to the recorded image. A light-field capture preserves enough information to reconsider some of them later. Foreground and background can be separated without a green screen. A shot can be reframed for different formats. Live action begins to share some of the flexibility of computer graphics.
But the capture system posed a stubborn question: where could all that dimensional information go? Karafin compared it to inventing a digital color camera when the available displays were still black and white. The camera could understand a volume. The audience still received a rectangle.
Changing sides of the image
Light Field Lab was built around the other half of the loop. Instead of collecting rays from a scene, it would reconstruct the rays a scene might have produced. The display surface is directly emissive and modular. Waveguides direct an enormous number of views into space. Rendering hardware and software decide what those views should contain in real time.
A point in space needs more than a pixel
A flat display sends one image outward. SolidLight directs many rays so they converge at a chosen point, letting both eyes focus naturally as the viewer moves.
This is why the company's numbers become immense. A 28-inch panel has been described as contributing 2.5 billion pixels to the generated holographic volume. Fifteen smaller display bricks formed the early panel configuration. Larger installations can tile modules into walls, with the viewing volume growing alongside the surface. The brute abundance of information is the product, not an unfortunate by-product.
A strikingly low-tech object helps Karafin explain this. A mirascope uses two curved reflectors to make a small object appear above its opening. The rays form a real image that can be viewed and futilely grabbed. Karafin has handed the inexpensive toy to visitors as an analog for the basic effect. SolidLight replaces the physical object and reflectors with a digital projection backplane. The toy gives the idea a handle. The company spends its time on everything hidden inside that sentence.
The garage invented fire
The founders began in a garage with knob-and-tube wiring, little insulation and a vintage washer-dryer pressed into service as office furniture. Karafin tells the story with the dry pride of someone who has survived a bad facilities plan. The early company possessed sketches of physics it had not yet demonstrated. Months passed in what he called “successful failures.”
Then a nanoparticle process trial caught fire. Karafin had not told Bevensee about the mishap when the smoke cleared. Amid the soot, he noticed a tiny area that behaved differently. He summoned his co-founders. They inspected the result and congratulated him on inventing fire. Karafin redirected them to a microscope, where the almost invisible patch offered evidence that their conceptual physics could work.
Deep-tech mythology usually prefers cleaner epiphanies. Here, the useful signal was microscopic and arrived with charred debris. The anecdote reveals Karafin's preferred form of optimism. It is not belief without evidence. It is the willingness to keep making evidence small enough to miss.
“Hard things are worth doing.”
A patient route out of the screen
The prototypes grew in public through a peculiar bestiary. In 2018, a monarch butterfly hovered in front of a small display. Karafin removed the lantern surrounding it, passed a magnifying glass through the image and let visitors move around the narrow viewing area. Later came a chameleon, a talking head and, by 2024, an interactive blue alien shown in a theatrical experience developed with the SETI Institute.
Each character marked a practical expansion. The butterfly occupied a small volume. The chameleon ran across a 28-inch system. The later character extended from head to torso in a one-square-meter display environment, responding through real-time performance capture and familiar 3D tools. A mysterious cube appeared to float in front of visitors. Actors in laboratory costumes supplied the human machinery of suspense.
The demonstration ladder
The business matured more conventionally. SolidLight was named to TIME's 2022 Best Inventions list. In February 2023, Light Field Lab announced a $50 million Series B led by NCSOFT, taking disclosed financing to $85 million. The round added backing from Corning, Gates Frontier, LG Technology Ventures and OTOY, among others, and was aimed at manufacturing and commercial deployment.
In December 2024, the company formally launched systems for enterprise customers. Karafin said contracts were in place for deployments beginning the following year, with early targets including venues, hotels, corporate lobbies, casinos and theme parks. This is the less cinematic phase of a futuristic company: manufacturing processes, content pipelines, installation schedules and customer feedback. Reality arrives on a purchase order.
What Karafin thinks comes next
Karafin's aspirations remain larger than signage. Light Field Lab helped establish an industry alliance for holographic media formats because a display without compatible content, tools and delivery standards becomes an island. His end-to-end view includes capture, conversion, rendering, distribution and interaction. The ambition resembles less a new television than a new visual medium.
At SXSW in 2025, speaking with Charlie Fink, he discussed what he called an era of mass virtualization. Entertainment and public installations are the near-term applications. Farther out, he imagined families recording and projecting memories in three dimensions at home. A durable reference point is the Holodeck, though he is careful about the optics that science fiction ignores. A believable object cannot simply hang anywhere. Light must come from somewhere.
That constraint may explain why Karafin is an interesting guide to this future. He has the artist's desire to make an encounter feel uncanny, the production executive's respect for a pipeline, and the scientist's habit of asking where every ray came from. He is willing to borrow his aspirations from Star Wars and Star Trek. He is equally willing to tell both franchises where their holograms violate the rules.
The yeast sculpture, the couch-sized camera, the scorched garage sample and the alien all belong to the same practice. Each takes something normally trapped in an idea or an image and demands that it survive in shared space. Karafin is not trying to make a prettier picture. He is trying to make the room renegotiate what counts as an object.