So if you haven’t become aware, holo­grams have been appear­ing more and more of late as the tech­nol­o­gy gets refined. Holog­ra­phy or the use of holo­grams have caught the atten­tion of techies and DIY’ers. Why? The first being it uses a smart phone and it’s real­ly easy to cre­ate. I found instruc­tions of how in a wire mag­a­zine arti­cle recent­ly published;

You’ll need a CD case, an x‑acto knife, graph paper, tape, and a pen—then just fol­low these steps:

1) First, use the graph paper and pen to mea­sure out a trape­zoid that is one cen­time­ter at the top, six cen­time­ters on the bot­tom, and 3.5 cen­time­ters at the sides.

2) Then using that trape­zoid and the x‑acto knife, cut out four iden­ti­cal trepe­zoids from the clear part of the CD case.

3) Cre­ate a pyra­mid by tap­ing the 3.5cm sides together.

And then you’re done. Fol­low along with a tuto­r­i­al video tuto­r­i­al.

Easy right! And now Sam­sung just patent­ed for a smart­phone screen that’s capa­ble of dis­play­ing objects in mid-air, in 3D. Is that right? Yes it is.

Sam­sungs (jobs at Sam­sung) next phone the Galaxy S7 may be holo­graph­ic, the patent was filed back in the sec­ond half of 2014. So the patent shows that the icons will be holo­graph­ic and hov­er over the sur­face of the glass. You’ll be able to touch them and the cam­era would detect the interactions.

Sam­sung could just be exper­i­ment­ing but that is enough to get excit­ed about. The patent was filed back in the sec­ond half of 2014. How far Sam­sung has come along with this – who knows but I’d love to see it appear in the Galaxy S7 next year.

Then there’s com­pa­ny Aer­i­al Bur­ton hav­ing used a plas­ma laser to float a 3D image in mid-air. At the moment it’s very rudi­men­ta­ry stuff but it shows that light can be viewed with­out the need to bounce it off a sur­face. Until now any “holo­gram” exam­ples have required glass, smoke or water to bounce light from.

The tech­nol­o­gy uses a 1kW infrared pulse laser which is focused on direct points in the air via a 3D scan­ner. It can cre­ate a pic­ture hov­er­ing at spec­i­fied ranges in midair, mol­e­cules in the air are ion­ized to cre­ate plas­ma. Since these plas­ma bursts only last a short while the laser needs to pulse in order to keep the area lit.

At present it’s lim­it­ed in col­ors but with devel­op­ment, enhanced res­o­lu­tion could mean a future where TVs are replaced by hid­den laser pro­jec­tors that cre­ate an image on thin air. You should read our oth­er arti­cle about “touch­able Holo­grams here.”

But for now Aer­i­al Bur­ton is focus­ing on using the holo­graph­ic pro­jec­tor to cre­ate signs for emer­gency sit­u­a­tions. The kit can be car mount­ed so could prove use­ful for set­ting up tem­po­rary signs. But what the future holds for this tech­nol­o­gy remains to be seen.

Try and imag­ine what the impli­ca­tions of this kind of tech­nol­o­gy on the media world. Holo­graph­ic Vir­tu­al tour guides in the shape of hum­ming­birds. Police cars pro­ject­ing over­heard for all to see warn­ing signs of incom­ing storms or acci­dents around a cor­ner. Imag­ine study­ing an ancient vase inside and out in full three dimen­sion­al glo­ry from your smart phone. Do you have your resume ready for these kinds of jobs? Can you think holographically?