How advanced is hologram technology?

Definitely illusion but interesting: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y-P1zZAcPuw

There are hologram things where you can put an object in a dish, and cover it, the mirrored surfaces make a hologram of the bject above, so realsitic that people actually try to touch it, thats pretty much all we have.

I think we’re still a long way off when we can do away with the spinning mirrors and glass cubes and just project a hologram onto thin air like in Star Wars.

I do have one of that dish. I love it. I’m wondering about like digital, more dynamic holograms.

@intro24 No, not really, aside from POV which is jsut a long exposure while they movie lights to make an image where there wasnt. It wouldn’t be hard to make a hologram really of sorts, we jsut need a polarized peice of glass or something simmilar to project onto with man projectors, so you couldt see the plastic, simmilar to waving a meter stick in front of a projector really fast, but thats it.

There is a hologram of Dick Van Dyke at the Disney Family Museum in San Francisco that was pretty amazing, but I don’t remember it being something I could walk around.

I have heard the Russians are working on algorithms that utilize holographic technology in microprocessors that will make Moore’s law obsolete.

This is the 4D show for Moscow’s recent 864th birthday party. This is really mind blowing. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NHX-A0c6ij0

@RubyB Not much more than projectors but it is cool. Bullshit when they say its 4D

You might find this interesting link

There is a lovely holographic stage at the Lincoln museum in Springfield, Il. The whole business is lights projected onto glass, and is realistic enough that, had I not told you just now that it’s all holographic, you’d think that it was a live performance put on by the staff – until the whole scene melts into the cemetery at Gettysburg.
There is an airport in the UK that has some holographic staff.

@HungryGuy I’ve seen projected still holograms back in 1991 at a small gallery / museum in the Dallas / Fort Worth area (can’t remember which city it was in, t’was long time ago) and there was a non-projected moving hologram of Jack Ruby shooting Lee Harvey Oswald as well. I’ve no idea how the latter was done. I know it’s possible to fake up stereoscopy from regular photos with a deep field of focus, but how to get from that to a hologram is a mystery to me.
I know of at least one theoretical way of generating dynamic (moving, generated on-the-fly) projected holograms using something like an “e-paper” screen with reflective “ink”. I don’t know that it’s ever been achieved, there are some fairly difficult engineering details to be seen to; but I was working on it back in the early Nineties and I feel sure other, smarter folks have worked on it since then.

@Nullo Those projections at the airport are not only not holograms, they are not similar to holograms in any meaningful way.
A hologram is an image produced by interference when a source of coherent light “encoded” with information (by, for example, reflecting off a photographic plate) crosses paths with a so called “reference” beam (identical to the first, but without the encoded information).

These things are just ordinary visible-light projections on a translucent screen (or is it transparent? I can’t remember the difference.) It’s probably possible to achieve a stereoscopic “3D” effect with them, but it’s still not a hologram.

Normally there’s roughly a 10 year gap between what the military has and what we, the civilian, know about. So how far are we really? Guess we’ll know how far we were today at least a decade from now.

Not all 3-dimensional images are holograms.

The technology shown in OP’s link (“I believe THIS is real…”) involves a clever system with a rotating mirror and rapid video frame rate that projects different images along multiple axes so that a different image is seen depending on viewpoint.

The illusion in the Black Eyed Peas concert is (as the website says) based on the Pepper’s Ghost illusion which dates to the 19C and uses a sheet of glass acting partly as a mirror and partly as a window, plus clever lighting.

A true hologram is based on recording the interference patterns of light waves, so that the wavefronts can be reconstructed during viewing. With true holograms you can actually move your head to look behind foreground objects. Holograms must record microscopic optical details on the order of a wavelength of light, generally less than one micrometer. That’s why it’s very difficult (but not impossible) to create a true moving hologram, where the microscopic interference pattern actually changes rapidly with time. That’s tough.