I’ve always wondered why holography hasn’t had much progress since its inception. Imagine what being able to harness and manipulate light with your bare hands in meaningful ways would be like: 3D photorealistic calls, truly immersive workspace. Given that it’s depicted in every futuristic scifi movie, one could not help but vision a future as such. This paper gives a clear overview why:

Turns out it’s incredibly difficult to compute and render photorealistic 3D data in real-time. The author claims immense computational power is needed for high data transmission rates, and compute of large number of phase pixels required for realistic 3D holography. The latest significant breakthrough in holography was 9years ago published in this paper - wherein they were able to achieve mid-air touchable/interactive 3D holography using a Femtosecond laser system considered safer than nanosecond lasers. Quite astounding work: arxiv.org/pdf/1506.06668

Realizing this breakthrough at scale is an unavoidably tempting research endeavor, super exciting especially with recent developments in machine learning and neural network algorithms demonstrating that computer-generated holograms can approach real-time processing. https://cdn-uploads.huggingface.co/production/uploads/6438a9027de34e8ea7e4b257/gjxRB-y9qSITf1iWIxU5F.qt