Avalon Holographics Creates Sonar Display for Hunting Submarines

Kongsberg Geospatial has partnered with Avalon Holographics to develop a holographic sonar display for submarine warfare, in a project funded by the Canadian Department of National Defence IDEaS (Innovation for Defence Excellence and Security) program.

The system has been developed to reduce the cognitive load on passive sonar analysts by visualising complex undersea environments on a revolutionary new holographic display.

What are sometimes thought of as 3-D displays are actually two-dimensional projections of three-dimensional scenes on a flat monitor. The geometry in the scene is necessarily distorted to create the illusion of looking at a three-dimensional object. To understand what they are looking at, an operator has to manipulate the view to look around the environment.

This is also limiting for situations in which multiple people are looking at the same display. A holographic display would provide a better solution for sharing 3-D information because the view of the data can be individualised, while the image itself remains static.