A Canadian tech company and well-known defense contractor have linked up for a multimillion-dollar deal on first-of-its-kind 3D technology that will ultimately aid the U.S. Armed Forces and military defense.
On Sept. 9, Lockheed Martin Canada committed $11.7M CAD to Avalon Holographics, based in St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labradora. The company is a national leader in the design and manufacturing of holographic display technologies for defense, industrial design and medical applications through its NOVAC display.
Avalon is known for its 3D holographic displays, hailed by officials as “the first of their kind in the world” that bring digital models into the real-world without glasses or headsets. Minimizing complexity and maximizing speed allows users—including those who wear the fatigues—to make quicker, more accurate decisions.
“This is basically a frictionless, collaborative digital sand table,” Wally Haas, president and founder of Avalon Holographics, told Military.com. “So, what that really means is you’ve got a 3D representation of the battle space with terrain, with platforms, with RFW, all that stuff, and you get to look down on it because it’s a tabletop display.
“Everybody can see it from all angles. You look down on it, and you can see these digital objects as if they were real.”
While Avalon has collaborated with Lockheed Martin Canada since 2020, this is viewed as a new venture. This deal also includes a new $5.6M CAD contract that follows an initial $6.1M CAD Phase 1 investment.
“We’ve worked with Lockheed in the past on R&D contracts, but this is the first delivery of one of our holographic displays to Lockheed, and they’re using it now,” Haas added.
‘Stuff of Movies’
Haas founded Avalon in 2015. This is his second company after selling the first one to Intel in 2010 to focus on building on innovation in the holographic display world.
While it sounds like the stuff of science fiction, that was the intent.
“What we do is make these super high-quality holographic displays,” Haas said. “It’s inspired by Iron Man 2 and Star Wars and the Star Trek holodeck, and these things are absolutely amazing because they reproduce light the way that humans see it.
“The vision of the company is to make these large holographic displays that go everywhere. They go in the theater, your computer, your phone, every large screen that you use would be holographic eventually. That’s the vision.”
While anyone that conducts 3D printing or something in that realm of technology, Haas notes that the hologram shows content suspended in the air. The options are copious.
“You can have radio signals, you can have sight lines, tracks, all sorts of stuff that basically are the stuff of movies, but you get to see it in real life, and then everybody gets to see it at the same time,” he said. “So, if you have mission planning, mission briefings, battle space awareness, battle damage assessment, electronic warfare planning—these are the kinds of things that are very good on a holograph display.”
How This Benefits National Militaries and Defense Systems
Haas said Avalon believes that all the different branches have a need for enhanced battle space and spatial awareness of their operating domains.
And while Lockheed Canada effectively paid for the tech, he said it’s actually Lockheed on the U.S. side that is receiving the benefit. That’s due to the device being installed in Lockheed’s 50,000-square-foot Center for Innovation in Suffolk, Va., known as The Lighthouse.
“That’s down there now, and people are using it for scenario planning and scenario briefings,” Haas said. “That’s sort of Lockheed supporting naval applications. But we’ve had interest from the Space Force for satellite and space vehicle interaction.
“We’ve had interest from the Army around maneuver warfare and drones. We’ve had interest from Special Forces around battle damage assessment and very fine detail of on-edge applications. And then the Air Force, for EW [electronic warfare] and air operations planning.”
The technology is still being developed in Canada, with the “mothership” being St. John’s, Newfoundland, where Haas and most of the Avalon team are based. There’s also a very large contingent in Edmonton.
“But the technology benefit is expected to be worldwide, right?” Haas added. “So, for example, these large holographic tables, we’re delivering them to customers mostly in the U.S. right now. There’s one at the University of Central Florida. There’s one now at Lockheed in in Virginia, and there’s more expected.
“So, even though it’s being developed in Canada, honestly, the primary beneficiary right now is probably the U.S. defense forces.”
Potential Impact on Economy and Jobs
In terms of the possibilities, which encompass not just tech itself but the economic ramifications, Haas views it from a duopolistic perspective between who can use it and why they would use it.
“Right now, when we think about the conflicts around the world, there’s a lot of need for the good guys to win,” he said. “And one of the ways that has been sort of well understood is that good spatial awareness, cognitive dominance. These are the kinds of things that help win, and we want to aid that.”
But beyond that military context, holographic displays extend beyond since they’re quite useful in other industries, for example, medical.
Haas mentioned surgery planning and consultations, effectively having a digital representation of the body as if the body was literally in the room. MRIs and CT scans produce 3D data that Avalon can leverage with its holographic technology.
There’s also digital twin and resource exploitation, like large complex builds, data center builds, semiconductor plant builds, and even entertainment-focused ambitions like large theme parks.
“As they’re getting built, people want to compare what is being built versus what is being designed, and being able to see that in a 3D nature—like a true digital twin nature—is very useful,” he said.
Eventually, such tech can be as commonplace as in one’s living room, said Haas, a Buffalo Bills fan who envisions live sporting events utilizing the tech as if those in a room are actually at a stadium watching live.
In terms of the jobs component, Haas said almost all the 2D displays that we use now were being sourced from mostly in China, with some also coming from Korea and Japan. He said the intention is to bring this all into North America.
“Certainly, for the first pilot lines and generations, for them to be produced here, we expect thousands of jobs to be produced in North America, and probably hundreds of thousands of jobs,” he said. “That’s the size of Samsung Electronics, LG, BOE, that’s how big these companies are. We can expect those industries to be here.”
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