Gregg E. Favalora

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Gregg E. Favalora (Arlington, Mass., USA)

Gregg Favalora is not a holographer in the traditional sense. Rather, he has focused on the design and development of many three-dimensional display architectures since being bitten by the "3-D bug" in 1988. He holds a BSEE from Yale and a Masters' in Engineering Sciences from Harvard, which he left in 1997 to found Actuality Systems, a firm specializing in 3-D visualization for medical imaging, oil & gas, and entertainment. His research interests include optics, 3-D displays and electro-holography, biologically-inspired electronic systems design and "neuromorphic engineering", and industrial design. In his spare time he wishes he were better at playing the drums and the ancient strategy game of go.

In 1996, while a student at Yale, Gregg developed the first parallel raster-scanned 3-D display under the guidance of Prof. Peter Kindlmann. It used 32 laser diodes in conjunction with a polygonal mirror scanner to illuminate a rotating diffuse screen with 32,768 voxels. The autostereoscopic, full-parallax volumetric image occupied roughly egg-sized volume. It is described in U.S. Pat. 5,936,767 and has been in operation - through at least 2006 - in Becton Center at Yale University since 1996.

In 1997, Gregg founded Actuality Systems to develop software and opto-electronic systems for true 3-D visualization.

In 2001, Actuality's engineers developed the world's highest-resolution volumetric 3-D display. Now marketed under the name Perspecta(r), it generates 10"-diameter 3-D imagery by projecting patterned light at 6,000 frame/s onto a swiftly rotating diffuse screen. The imagery created by Perspecta is composed of approximately 100 million voxels.

Through 2006, Actuality's innovations include:

"Spatial Visualization Environment," the world's first software platform that interprets graphical data from standard applications and processes them for displays of a wide variety of underlying physics, such as multiplanar displays, holographic displays, and highly-multiview displays.

With a team including Oliver S. Cossairt, Rick K. Dorval, and Sam Hill, showed that it is possible to create a volumetric display with voxels having viewer-position-dependent effects, such as variable opacity.

Developed several quasi-holographic "aerial" display systems that project free-floating imagery measuring 1" x 1" x 1" to 6" x 6" x 3".

Working with leading hospitals to use volumetric 3-D displays for the review of cancer therapy plans using radiation oncology.

Gregg is an inventor or co-inventor on:

  • U.S. Pat. 5,936,767, "Multiplanar autostereoscopic imaging system"
  • U.S. Pat. 6,183,088, "Three-dimensional display system"
  • U.S. Pat. 6,487,020, "Volumetric three-dimensional display architecture"
  • U.S. Pat. 6,512,498, "Volumetric stroboscopic display"
  • U.S. Pat. 6,570,681, "System and method for dynamic optical switching"
  • U.S. Pat. 6,940,653, "Radiation conditioning system"

Gregg is a winner of the 1996 National Inventors' Hall of Fame / BFGoodrich Collegiate Inventors Award, is a member of the MIT Technology Review "TR-100" young innovators, and is a frequent speaker on the topic of entrepreneurship. Due in large part to the efforts of Actuality's engineers, his work has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Wired, CNN Headline News, and a variety of major technology and medical publications around the world.