This week, scientists in Arizona announced they've taken another step toward bringing a sci-fi mainstay to life: the hologram movie.
Unlike the Oscar-winning movie Avatar or animations from Pixar, a hologram movie would be truly three-dimensional. Viewers could actually walk around the image, as if it were a solid object.
"If you look at the object from different angles," says Nasser Peyghambarian, a professor of optics and engineering at the University of Arizona in Tucson, "you see different things because those are different perspectives of that object."
Funding for the research comes, in part, from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the Air Force. Peyghambarian says holograms could one day be useful for military training operations.
But his main inspiration came straight out of Hollywood. Peyghambarian points to the scene in the movie Star Wars where a hologram of Princess Leia asks for help from Obi Wan Kenobi. "This has always been our goal," he says.
Key to this process was the development of a special, photorefractive polymer — essentially a transparent screen — that could display the image, then quickly erase it and refresh with a new image. Peyghambarian's team was able to project a hologram image that can refresh every two seconds.
To build the hologram, the team used 16 cameras that each captured a different perspective of a researcher sitting in the middle of a room. The images were collected by computer and sent to another lab, where the information was converted into a pulsed laser. A display system showed the person in 3-D, complete with his movements.
"It's like a slow movie," he says. "But it's getting there. In the next experiment, we'll use 32 cameras."
Peyghambarian says that in addition to Hollywood, holograms could play a part in hospitals, allowing doctors to perform surgery remotely, or in factories, where manufacturers could use them to design cars and airplanes.
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