Two years ago a team of researchers at the University of Arizona announced a major breakthrough in holography – they had succeeded in updating a holographic image. This was the first demonstration that moving holograms were possible. For a holographic image to appear to move, the image has to be deleted and replaced with a new image. Nobody had previously been able to do this before. The Arizona team could only update their image once every 4 minutes, but it as a massive proof of concept, and the first step towards holographic tv. (note that the live ‘holographic’ projections such as the anime singer Hatsune Miku are not true 3D holograms).
Now, two years later, the same researchers have given details of how far they have progressed towards holographic television in the last 2 years. They have managed to massively speed up the refresh rate of each holographic image to a highly respectable once every two seconds. Only a few more doublings until they reach the magical 30 frames per second of ordinary tv. What’s more, they have succeeded in transmitting the image over an ethernet connection, meaning that live holographic tv (read holographic webcam performers etc) is likely to become reality in only ‘7 -1 0 years’ according to the head of the team.
Given that there are other research teams, notably in Japan and Korea, working on their own holographic tv (or holo tv) technology, that prediction might be erring a little on the side of caution.
