Home Made Holographic Display

Want a hologram style display in your own home?  How about in your own hands?  What about the video below?  All of these things are tied together by the same illusion as Peppers Ghost.

The basics of this make use of the same technology as a 2 way mirror.  In short, a single piece of glass or plastic is all that is required.  In a 2 way mirror, the glass is mostly transparent (aside from a semi transparent coating of reflective material) allowing you to see through both directions with only a small amount of light reflect back to you.  This works fine as a window, as long as the is light on the side of the glass you’re looking through.  Turn off the lights on the opposite side and the only light you’ve got to see is the reflection of yourself.

What if it’s not total darkness on the opposite side though?  Somewhere in between you’ll find a point that you can see both your reflection and the other side of the mirror.  Put that glass/mirror on a slight angle and you’re not seeing your reflection but the guy next to you.  As the light has to travel the distance from your buddy to the mirror then back to your eye, the image appears to originate in the space behind the mirror.  Not following? Let’s make an example.

Grab some old cd covers and cut them into a rhombus shape as seen below.  The measurements for a mobile phone should be:

Base: 6cm

Top: 1cm

Height from base to top: 3.5cm

if you want to do this with an iPad or tablet just double those and you should end up with something like the image below.

 

 

 

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Now we’re going to need 4 of these.  You don’t really need 4 but it’s easier for stability.  Once you have all 4 ready to go, make sure they’re clear of fingerprints etc and tape them together as below.

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A little tape should result in a nice 4 sided truncated pyramid.  Hit YouTube and look for “Holho”.  Turn the lights out and fire up one of their videos and place you pyramid upside down on the centre of your screen and you should see something like this…

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Now, I know it doesn’t look like much in the picture but live in person it makes a magnificent floating image/video that most people refer to as a hologram.  But this still isn’t Goku powering up.  So, scale it up a bit by using a full size monitor, then flip the whole thin upside down leaving a Goku figure in the little pyramid and overlay a video of flames in the relevant spot.  Pretty it up with a nice case and we’re done.

 

Th at’s all I have for this post, but what if I told you I could give you 3d video without having to wear glasses and without the weird phone pyramid I just described?

 

Stay tuned…

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