NICT Develops fVisioOn, A Holographic Tabletop

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It’s amazing to consider how long holography has been under development. And a lot of things have been tried to get there, including tricks with mirrors and plenty of other such chicanery. But the folks out at NICT in Japan have figured out a way to do it, and even though it doesn’t look that great, it still represents a pretty big stride.

Based on one of those mirror tricks I just mentioned, NICT’s combined a proprietary device they developed along with a series of tiny projectors set up on a circle. The end result, dubbed the fVisioOn Table, reproduces the light that would have reflected off an object and reached our eyes, thus making it look as if an object were present in the center of the table, even though there’s nothing there.

The end result is a little–okay, a lot–low-resolution and pretty much limited to extraordinarily blurry bunnies like the one you see above and a couple other things, but NICT’s next goal is to improve the resolution and the size of the image. Call it proof of concept, really, but it might just be that commercial holography just got a whole lot closer.