What is it about?

Holographic displays can create true 3D images for next-generation AR/VR—images that have real depth, not just a flat image on a screen. But to feel believable, your brain also quietly checks the colors: white should look white, greenery should look natural, and materials like metal or wood should “feel right” under different lighting. In laser-based holographic displays, colors can drift because lasers and optics behave very differently from everyday light. Even the camera the system uses to “judge” its own output can be biased. Our work makes that camera feedback closer to what a person would actually see, then uses it as a reliable guide to automatically adjust the balance of red, green, and blue laser light so the hologram looks much closer to the intended appearance. The result is more natural, more believable hologram colors—bringing AR/VR a step closer to photorealism.

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Why is it important?

In AR/VR, realism isn’t just about sharpness—if materials and lighting look wrong, the whole experience feels less believable. Our experiments and controlled user study show that people consistently judged our results as having better perceptual color fidelity than common baselines, moving holograms closer to photorealistic AR/VR experiences.

Perspectives

Holographic displays offer true 3D visuals for next-generation AR/VR, but even when depth cues look great, wrong colors can quickly break the illusion. As AR/VR moves toward photorealism, color will become a first-class requirement—not an afterthought. We hope this work helps holographic systems adapt their color output to more closely match what people actually see. This can make virtual objects feel like they belong in the real world, supporting more natural remote collaboration, product visualization, and immersive storytelling.

Chun Chen
Seoul National University

Read the Original

This page is a summary of: PAColorHolo: A Perceptually-Aware Color Management Framework for Holographic Displays, ACM Transactions on Graphics, January 2026, ACM (Association for Computing Machinery),
DOI: 10.1145/3789511.
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