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We’re ‘Maybe Five-ish’ Years Away From Princess Leia Holograms
Or to be more precise, volumetric Princess Leia images
You’re sitting at your dining room table, drinking wine and chatting with your closest friends and family. Music plays gently from the stereo, and the room has a happy, congenial energy. But there’s only one actual glass of wine on the table, one small plate of charcuterie, one silverware setting.
You’re the only person physically sitting in your dining room. Everyone else gathered around it is a hologram, and though they can see you and you can see them and you can talk to each other as if you’re physically together, you’re not. You can’t touch them; if you do, their image will refract and distort. But emotionally, it feels like you’re together. It’s not as good as the real thing (no hugging) but it’s pretty close.
This is, of course, a fantasy — one that began in earnest when R2-D2 projected a hologram of Princess Leia delivering an urgent message to Obi-Wan Kenobi in 1977’s Star Wars: A New Hope (though technically, the first fictional hologram appeared in Isaac Asimov’s 1951 Foundation trilogy).
Movies are now replete with the technology; Back to the Future Part II (1989), Iron Man (2008), and Black Panther (2018) are just a few of many that feature holographic displays. Despite the decades-long prevalence of this technology in fiction, though, we still seem to be no closer to dining with our holographic family members.
A number of hurdles stand in the way of ever getting a holographic message from your friend, from the logistical (funding is always a problem) to the potential hazards involved (some early forms of holograms are potentially dangerous).
Still, researchers are hard at work creating holograms that, hopefully, will be available to consumers — some day. There’s a distinct possibility that, in our lifetimes, we will have 3D, Princess Leia-like “holograms” from which we can receive messages and even interact with in real time…
