The Future of Holographic Technology

From Cave 2 to Hologram Tupac, 3D displays and holography are changing the way we experience our world. And as we move toward new and improved ways to interact with 3D, how will these new technologies change our daily life? What are the implications on "real" human interaction in the future?

what exactly is a hologram anyway? When you take a picture with a normal camera, you're really just recording a single splash of light across a two-dimensional surface, like film. But a holographic camera, well that uses a laser beam splitter to split into two beams of light. You've got one that's just a clean reference signal, and another one that you've run over a three dimensional object. So you can measure all those nooks and crannies and create a light map of that object.

So could we ever get to that free standing hologram? Well one way we might try is by using a lot of different projectors to project light into a cloud of fog. Now the fog would actually act as a three-dimensional movie screen, and particles within the fog would actually reflect the light back to us. Maybe we're even going to come up with technologies we can't even dream of right now to make holograms possible.