I had a crazy thought today about how to create actual, free-floating holograms. I’m not talking about the fake “Pepper’s Ghost” glass illusions or those spinning LED fans. I mean a real, 3D object floating in the middle of an empty room that you can walk around. Hear me out on the setup, the physics, and my workarounds for the… side effects. The Setup Imagine a specially modified room where we mount high-powered projectors/lasers in all the corners and angles. We use LiDAR to map the room and track where people are, and a specially trained AI controls everything. The Physics (How we make the pixels) Standard projector light won’t work because photons don’t crash into each other in thin air; they just pass right through. But what if we swap projectors for infrared femtosecond lasers? We use the AI to cross multiple laser beams at one exact microscopic point in mid-air. One beam does nothing, but where they all intersect, the energy spikes violently. This rips electrons off the air molecules, turning that specific microscopic spot into glowing, superheated plasma. Boom: you just created a true 3D pixel (a voxel) out of thin air! Move that intersection point thousands of times a second, and you can draw a 3D object. The Catches (Noise & Toxic Gas) Here is where the reality check hits. The Noise: Every time you make one of those plasma pixels, it creates a tiny shockwave (a microscopic explosion). Drawing a full 3D object requires millions of these a second. It wouldn’t be a quiet sci-fi glow; it would sound like a deafening chainsaw. The Gas: Burning air molecules creates ozone and nitrogen oxides, which are toxic to breathe in an enclosed room. My Practical Workarounds I figured, why not treat the room like a hazardous work environment? For the noise: Standard active noise-canceling headphones (like AirPods) wouldn’t be fast enough to block millions of unpredictable mini-explosions. We would need to wear heavy-duty, passive industrial ear defenders (like airport tarmac crews wear) and earplugs just to prevent hearing damage. For the gas: Standard HEPA air purifiers won’t catch gas. We would need massive, industrial-grade activated carbon ventilation systems. Think massive exhaust fans in the ceiling sucking air out faster than the lasers can poison it. The Conclusion It wouldn’t be the magical, peaceful Star Wars hologram experience we’ve been promised. You couldn’t just casually walk into your living room to chat with a hologram. You’d have to gear up with massive earmuffs, step into a room that feels like a hurricane wind tunnel because of the exhaust fans, and then the lasers would fire up to draw a glowing, screaming plasma object in the center of the room. But technically… it would work. Who wants to fund this? *** TL;DR: We can make true 3D holograms by crossing lasers to create glowing plasma out of thin air. It creates deafening explosions and toxic gas, but if we wear industrial ear defenders and stand in a heavy-duty ventilation wind tunnel, it’s entirely feasible. submitted by /u/revived_soul_37
Originally posted by u/revived_soul_37 on r/ArtificialInteligence