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).
