The RED Hydrogen One will be launched in the US this summer, according to mobile carriers AT&T and Verizon. The device was shown off by RED to a select media group at Red Studios in Hollywood, where the company’s Founder and CEO Jim Jannard said, “We want everybody's first experience with Hydrogen One to be like yours: in-person."
“The sides of the aluminum body are scalloped mimicking the lens mount lock on the company's cinema cameras. Despite the size, it's comfortable to hold,” CNET wrote in its hands-on. The publication got to see video clips from Guardians Of The Galaxy Vol. 2, Avatar and Pixar’s animated film Brave, adapted to the phone’s 4V display format.
“I was impressed and couldn't believe how well the effect worked. It's part hologram and part 3D. It's not that the image hovers over the screen like R2-D2 projecting Princess Leia in the original Star Wars film. It's more that there were layers of depth to the image. It's as if the screen was a proscenium theater and some parts of the image were upfront and close and other parts of the image were farther away,” CNET’s Patrick Holland reported.
Besides watching holographic content, the Hydrogen One will also allow users to make holographic video calls. Termed “Holo Chat” the service displays the caller’s and receiver’s faces as holograms in real time. According to The Verge, the Hydrogen One features two front-facing cameras to create a 3D image and there’s a special layer under the LCD display which directs light in multiple directions, as opposed to two directions which is a norm in lenticular displays. “RED is also doing more than just combining two images to make standard 3D — I’m told it’s trying to use an algorithm to blend multiple angles from those two lenses to create the effect. It’s a hologram, basically, but it doesn’t really pop out of the screen so much as give you depth within it. I wouldn’t describe this screen as the reason to go out and buy this phone, but it was neat,” Verge’s Bohn noted after his experience with the phone.
Given that RED is a company that makes cinema-grade cameras, the Hydrogen One also features a modular pogo pin setup at the back which will let users connect RED’s other cameras to the phone along with various modules, including lens mounts. The company is reportedly planning a module which is a huge DSLR size camera sensor that will attach to the back of the device. “According to CEO Jim Jannard, the company wants any traditional big camera lens to be attached to it. Answering a fan question, he joked that support for lenses will be work with Fuji, Canon, Nikon, Leica, and more,” The Verge reported.