Back in the 1970s, when I was still in high school, Holograms were all the rage, and we were told live entertainment would be revolutionized by these lifesized 3-D laser illusions. I believe Disneyland even had a ride with a hologram in it.
I’ve seen holograms used here and there, but I wouldn’t call it an entertainment revolution. So what gives? Was the hologram hype just that, hype, or did someone decide they really weren’t all that great after all? I know VR is the next big thing, but I miss our future world surrounded by talking holograms.
You may have missed this (fairly) recent trend, of holographic performances by dead musicians. These articles list performances by holographic projections of Roy Orbison, Frank Zappa, Ronnie James Dio, Tupac Shakur, Buddy Holley, and Whitney Houston, among others.
However, the second link, to the Washington Post, notes this:
(The Post article also mentions the long-running Haunted Mansion ride at Disneyland, which is probably the one you’re referring to.)
You can make some pretty amazing still images with holograms. I’ve seen some where you’d swear there was a hole cut in the table with a miniature stuck in the hole, until you pick up the piece of glass and the hole comes with it. But that’s still images. Even one still image takes a lot of time to create: You can take a picture of a person, but only with the use of those braces like they used to use for long-exposure photographs. There are some tricks that you can use to get multiple different images out of the same piece of glass, by illuminating it from different directions, but you’ll only get a few, far from the 25 per second you’d need for a reasonable “movie”. And even at that, you’d need a new piece of glass for every show, because nobody has yet come up with a technology that can produce arbitrary images on demand on a holographic “screen”.
The “holographic concerts” you hear about are actually nothing whatsoever like actual holograms. They’re just movies, cleverly designed to hide the movie screen. They’re not 3D at all, and count on the audience being far enough away to not notice that.
True holograms proved to be really tough to scale up from tabletops. Multiple labs have created holograms in different ways but they’re not commercially viable.
For the record, the much-hyped “hologram” of young Queen Elizabeth riding in her carriage at the Jubilee wasn’t any more real than the entertainers.
It should also be pointed out that movie-style ‘holograms’ where an image is somehow projected in mid-air is not physically possible. You need some media to reflect projected light because you can’t just interfere two light beams together to produce an image. You can create a holograph-like image by projecting a scanning laser onto a cylindrical screen that uses polarizing filters to give the appearance of different aspects from different angles but the the resolution of the image is necessarily limited and as you walk around it the transitions in aspects are jerky since they are limited by the angular resolution of the filters. This is ‘Eigties-era technology and despite some efforts with using flexible OLED displays instead of projected light it really hasn’t improved (other than being able to produce images across the color spectrum instead of monochromatic).
It is possible through the use of perspective tricks to make flat screen images appear to be three dimensional (as virtual reality does, largely by removing external background) but again the kind of images you can produce with this are limited. Similarly, smartphone and screen interface makers have been experimenting with haptic controls technologies to make a flat touchscreen seem to have a textured surface, i.e. replicating physical keys (by a combination of vibration and animation) but these are just perceptive tricks; it doesn’t actually project anything.
If you can figure out how to make light spontaneously appear in the air in a way that makes it seem like a truly three dimensional image, you’ll make billions off of the cosplayers who desperately want holographic displays that they see in television and movies. But make your money quick because once they realize that such displays are practically impossible to use because of all the light and movement in the background, they’ll dump them faster than an Apple Newton.
Who here has ever seen the hologram museum in San Jose, CA? This was 30-some years ago – I have no idea if that museum still exists, or has a different name, or has been incorporated into a bigger museum.
They had some amazing holograms. One of them showed an image of a microscope looking at a microchip. The eyepiece of the microscope image was positioned such that you could put your own eye up to in a look into it – and see the magnified microchip, like looking into a real microscope.
There was also a practical display: In Russia, there was a mobile hologram museum, with holographic displays of historical artifacts (things like items of jewelry from the palaces of the czars and such). This mobile museum could travel around the countryside, bringing culture to the rural peasants out in the hinterlands. The San Jose museum has some examples. They were very realistic images. You could walk around them to see the old jewelry from various angles.
So watching the Roy Orbison video is that a true hologram? Could I get up on the stage and walk around it and see it from all sides, or is it more a projection that can only be seen from one side? If it is a true hologram, did they make it from a 360-degree film that was shot of him while he was alive?
Nope, it’s not 360 degrees. As I noted in my reply, and as several others have also noted, the tours use the term “hologram,” but they are apparently not true holograms: they’re two-dimensional images, projected onto a scrim or screen that is invisible (or close to it), giving the audience the illusion of an image that’s not on a screen.
Until they can project a full-size 360-degree human hologram without a scrim or screen I’m not impressed. That was the future they promised us. Unfortunately, it may be impossible.
Well, a version is possible, but it involves ionizing patches of air in ways that seem to be just slightly more real-world practical than ground-launching Orion drives.
At Disneyland it was in the Snow White ride. They had a continual problem with people grabbing the apple from the wicked witch, so they made the apple holographic. I think the ride has been upgraded since then, though, and I don’t know if that was retained.
The Canton Ohio Football Hall of Fame has a cool hologram. There’s a Super Bowl Champion Ring displayed on a round table. Until you reach through it, it’s hard to tell that the real ring isn’t there.
I was in a hologram store/gallery once as a teen back in the early 1990s. They had a version of that one (though I think it was a bug in the microscope, not a microchip) and one with a telescope you could look into and see a woman undressing in a nearby house. (The prices were in the low hundreds, IIRC. Definitely not in my budget at the time.)
(And I see that the Youtube links I included in this earlier post still work.)
I remember in 1993 or 1994 at our college dorm a physics professor coming by for a “fireside chat” and creating a basic hologram on a glass plate IIRC of an object right then and there using lasers. I wish I had remembered the process, but he used a small object, like an action figure or something, and I was surprised at how simple the process seemed to me, and how three-dimensional the final product looked.
The Holograms released a few more albums in the '90s with a new lead singer, but they just weren’t the same after Jerrica Benton quit to pursue her solo career, and they wound up splitting in 1997.
