Holographic Display Technology and Future 3D Hologram TV and Phones

Holographic Display Technology, a Holographic iPhone or a 3D Hologram TV no longer sound like a far Future Technology stuff from Sci-Fi movies like StartWar Series, after the Tupac Hologram at Coachella 2012.

The term "hologram" has been coined from "holos" which meaning complete and "gram" which meaning message. Word "Hologram" has long been used to refer to both the technique of wavefront reconstruction by interference, diffraction and reflection.

3D Hologram is an image genre that represent a virtual encounter between an immaterial, usually 3D image stream of an absent human and living humans.

Technology Product companies including Google, Microsoft, Apple, Samsung and Sony are actively involved in Research and Development of product prototypes making use of Holographic Display Technology. Last year we posted that IBM, Intel and Nokia gearing up for 3D Hologram Technology Mobile Phones in five years. Similarly there are strong evidences that Apple is working on Holographic iPhone and iPad screen displays that can project the content menus in the form of a interactive 3D Hologram where user can interact with the various apps using natural hand gestures.

Tupac Hologram at Coachella 2012

After the successful performance presentation of long-deceased famous rapper Tupac Shakur, at Coachella 2012, the holographic technology behind the resurrection is a dream comes to reality.

However the Coachella Hologram took around four months to create costing almost $400,000. Which show that 3D Holographic Display Technology still have a long course to follow to be available for commercial application affordable for common consumers.

3D Holographic Maps by Zebra Imaging

Tupac 3D Hologram performance came a week after the release of a public web interface for uploading 3D data to produce full-colour, 360-degree, 3D holographic prints by Zebra Imaging. Zebra Imaging’s ZSCAPE 3D Prints are actually holograms. They combine 3D imaging concepts and methods developed over the past century, with processes of synthetic hologram generation developed by the Spatial Imaging Group at MIT.

Here under is a color 3D Hologram Map, created with data from Google Sketchup. The model is of downtown Seattle. The building heights in this hologram get up to about 10 inches.


These hologram prints are made from arrays of holographic pixels know as hogels, which contain three-dimensional information about how the scene should appear from a range of perspectives.

Sophisticated image processing algorithms, which model and compensate for the distortions of optical recording and perspective, result in full parallax – where further-away objects appear, realistically, to move more slowly than closer objects – white-light-viewable images.

Future Holographic Display Technology Applications

One of the most exciting developments in the Holography world is the progress of Holographic TV, initiated by the work of Stephen Benton at MIT, which is the place where Real-time, moving holograms are currently being researched, which will eventually result in holographic TV as a consumer device within coming few years.

But 3D Holograms and related Holographic Display Technology has much more applications than just movies and live performances, ranging from Defense, Scientific Research, Business, Education and Living Room Entertainment to almost every area of life that involves display screens.

Since Holograms can be displayed horizontally and can be viewed in 3 dimensions from 360 degree angels, they lend themselves remarkably useful for applications which require spatial precision to analyses, such as Geo-seismic Models, Terrain modelling, Scientific Visualization, Medical Dissections and Architectural Models.