Last year I quit my job, which was
super exciting and also scary.
And I never thought I would be that person,
and yet here I am in my living room talking to myself.
Have you to thank for it, so thanks for being here.
When I first struck out on my own, I was super burned out
and I just wanted some time to chill.
So I started watching the Marvel cinematic universe
in chronological order by story from the beginning, including
the TV shows.
Yeah, highly recommended.
It was actually super fun, and definitely
a conversation starter.
Link to the CNET list in the description.
Thanks CNET.
But this got me thinking about holograms,
which are literally everywhere in Marvel's universe.
All the Iron Mans, Black Panther,
the Guardians of the Galaxy, the Agencies
of S.H.I.E.L.D. Because you know, like attorneys general?
Yeah.
Makes sense.
All the Avengers.
Oh-ho!
They love their holograms.
Anyway you get it.
These movies are all set in the near future,
but we don't actually have holograms yet.
Right?
Do we?
I have questions.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Greetings programs.
Thanks for tuning into UnoDoseofTrace.
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Welcome new people.
I'm Trace.
This is my channel.
Computerized holograms are amazing,
and fascinating to humankind it would seem,
because the first attempt to make
a three-dimensional hologram was in the 1960s.
But holograms technically aren't what you're seeing in the MCU.
Scientifically speaking, a hologram
is a 2D thing that appears 3D.
It's got more information in a 2D space than it should.
A 3D thing that is a 3D thing would
be called a volumetric image or volumetric display.
Now, I'm going to be using the term hologram,
but know that what I mean is a volumetric display.
It's not entirely accurate to say hologram,
but there's not really a quick way to say volumetric display,
and the acronym (CLEARS THROAT) it's taken.
Yeah.
So for my purposes today a hologram
is a three-dimensional image reproduced
from a pattern of interference produced
by a split coherent beam of radiation, such as a laser.
Don't think radiation from nuclear plants, by the way.
It's just light.
Electromagnetic radiation.
It's bathing on you right now out of my face.
It's a 3D image that somehow is able to float in the air.
It was first used as a pop culture plot
device in the 1893 book, The Carpathian Castle
by bae Jules Verne.
And that's just amazing.
That man is amazing.
I love it.
Also read it.
But really, Star Wars is sort of what made it a thing.
Because if you look it up in pop culture,
mentions of holograms before the 70s?
Not that much going on.
After the 70s?
Everywhere.
And Star Wars loved volumetric displays.
So much that they actually pegged the entire plot
of Act One on the performance of a tiny little
blue volumetric display.
Help me Obi-Wan Kenobi.
You're my only hope.
Holograms are painting with light in 3D space,
but even though it's a long time ago in a galaxy far,
far away, we are not quite like that yet here.
Light doesn't just stop on its own,
and that's the biggest obstacle to holograms.
See, light just kind of tends to go in a direction
until something stops it.
For example, your eyeballs when you
look at the stars, the light that you're seeing
is literally physically from that star.
Maybe it's a billion years old.
That's amazing, right?
But because that light doesn't stop
until it gets absorbed into your eye buckets,
or hits the tree, or the ground, or an asteroid, or whatever,
most of our holograms have to cheat and look like this.
These are spinning blades that simulate a 3D object.
The LEDs are flashing really fast
to emit light and make it seem like there's something there.
Not unlike those stupid clocks that you
use to get at Spencer's gifts that just did this
the whole day.
Oh, god.
They were so dumb.
Why did people buy those?
The effect is pretending to be a hologram,
and what it's relying on is the stupidity of our brains.
I'll get back to that in a second.
Because the screen is moving at such a high speed
you can't touch it, it would hit your finger.
And I learned that the hard way as a kid.
Curiosity almost took off my fingers,
which is a story for another time.
But if you want to make a volumetric display
without spinning blades, or flitting back and forth
like the stupid Spencer's gift clock,
you need something to reflect light off.
One thing you see a lot is water,
like Disney's water projection for Fantasmic!,
which I love so much!
Disney's use of science to make magic is the best!
I love it so much.
If you're watching and you work at Disney,
call me, because I would love to work there.
Other solids like UCLA's augmented reality sandbox,
which you might have seen an example
of in the recent episode of Smarter Every Day.
But none of these are true holograms
like you would see in Star Wars, or Star Trek, or the MCU,
right?
Somewhat disappointing.
And yet, there are holograms out there in real life,
and I looked up all of the information.
Let's do it!
There are two types--
plasma and particle holograms.
Basically, our brain is lazy, so all you have to do
is pulse a light in a circle, or move a laser around,
and our brain will draw the lines using those pulses
to fill in the gaps.
To make it seem like this is a butterfly,
it's called the persistence of vision,
and it's the same thing that makes movies and TV work.
But movies and TV are two dimensional.
So their little light emitting things are called pixels.
But we're talking 3D, so we need a new word!
Voxel!
Yeah!
It's literally the exact same thing,
but it's just points in 3D space.
So holograms today use the laziness of our brain,
plus voxels to make drawings in 3D space.
Particle holograms are fascinating.
Use lasers to literally trap particles in midair.
Technically, they're called optical trap displays
or free space volumetric displays.
The most well-known one is out of Brigham Young University,
and it's what you're seeing here.
It's basically a tiny particle being
suspended on the forces of near invisible laser light.
The laser heats the particle a bit,
allowing it to pull and push it around using
the electromagnetic energy of the laser light.
A second laser is actually creating the color
and lighting it up.
And they can make it any color you want.
And if you walk around the display, it's actually there.
It's in 3D space with you, which is incredible!
If there were lots of particles there like,
shooting around creating a whole bunch of different things,
you could walk around them and see
the sides of, say, a person's face, or the top of their head.
It's there.
It's physical.
It's in front of you.
But it's not perfect, because right now it's super teeny.
And (TEENY VOICE) help me Obi Wan Kenobi.
You're my only hope!
It's just not as good as the one that they have.
And they can't control lots of particles at once yet.
They just got the one.
By the way, that particle?
Not dust or plastic.
It's cellulose.
It's a plant fiber, specifically made and picked up
by the lasers.
And that actually exposes another weakness,
because the particle it can blow away in the wind,
and it's gone.
Image would disappear.
And that makes it tough for adoption in the military.
On top of that, if this product is the one that
comes to, say, CES in 2025 as a thing that shoots out
of your watch and tells you messages, or I don't know,
is on the Google Home or something,
you would probably then need particle cartridges.
So you would sell the device, and you still
have a steady stream of income just like an ink-jet printer.
After a bit of time, your TV would be like,
more particles is needed in order to watch the big game!
So you got to go fill up the old cellulose cartridge
over at Best Buy, or whatever.
Ugh, Yay!
Capitalism!
And so, if you don't want a particle cartridge,
you'd have to use the other system,
and that is a plasma hologram.
Plasma solved that problem by just literally heating up
the air.
Here's a project called fairy lights in femtoseconds.
It's a display from Tokyo using high powered lasers fired
for just a few femtoseconds at a time,
creating a tiny ball of superheated plasma.
It's so metal in the air!
It's ionizing actual air.
No cellulose needed, which sounds
a little bit like a spider-man villain,
but, in fact, it's not.
And you can touch it.
Allegedly, it feels like sandpaper,
or like a little static shock.
Even though it's a high-powered laser
it doesn't burn you, because the lasers fire for only like 30
to 270 femtoseconds, which is like quadrillionths
of a second.
They're also firing so fast that they
can react to people as well.
So you could have an interactive display
where you can feel a check-box, and tap it or check it,
and it will be able to react to that.
Or if you think about it, Tony Stark's virtual volumetric
displays suit, (LAUGHS) or whatever.
But because it's a flash of plasma--
(LAUGHS) I'm such an idiot.
[BEEP]
But because it's a flash of plasma,
the color fidelity is limited.
It can really just do white, unlike the optical trap
display that has a whole gamut of colors.
So both of these things look like holograms.
They quack like holograms, so they're holograms or volumetric
displays, right?
Yes and no.
They're not ready for consumer use yet.
They're super tiny, and they're not entirely
perfected and miniaturized yet.
Plus, both plasma and particle displays have a big problem,
and that's being see-through.
Just like Princess Leia's message,
you can see through the image no matter
where you put it in 3D space.
And solutions are thin on the ground as much
as the images appear thin in the air.
And while it works really well in movies,
that would not make it easy to use as an actual computer
display.
So volumetric displays a real, but we
can't use them quite like the Guardian's of the Galaxy yet.
No smooth perfect surfaces, and depending on the tech,
the color is a bit difficult. They're just pinpoints of light
that our brain fills in space around.
But technically, the first TVs were low-resolution black
and white, and we commonly see 4K TVs today,
with flat surfaces of 8 million pinpoints of light,
and a huge color gamut.
And once we figure out the technology, what's
to stop voxels from being able to get denser, and brighter,
and better in every way?
The main thing there is data.
A tiny icon on your computer screen
might be 256 rows of 256 pixels, right?
But a voxel adds another dimension--
256 by 256 by 256, which is a huge increase in data.
And I'm no computer engineer, but we're
talking like an order of magnitude at least.
Imagine if your 4K TV needed to make 4,000 depths as well.
Every 24th of a second, or every 60th or 120th if you're gaming.
The data throughput for something like that
would be nutso.
I read one writer who did some math,
and they said that it might be hundreds
of gigabytes per second for a very small,
like 1720p volumetric display.
Because of all these problems, for now we just have to cheat.
We use 2D displays to mimic three dimensions.
We call it virtual reality, which is all-encompassing,
or augmented reality, which is an overlay.
I love augmented reality.
I think it's going to be way huger than VR very soon.
Because AR kit comes in every single one of these.
Imagine creating virtual dimensional displays
over information and advertisements,
games and scavenger hunts, updates on specific locations
or at restaurants, geo caches.
The possibilities of the amount of data
that you could layer onto the boring old reality we already
live in would be amazing, and you don't have
to write a whole new reality.
There's already a lot of data out here ready for us.
And if Pokémon GO can get people out of the house with a tiny,
little, teeny screen, if we give people glasses,
then there's no tiny window into a virtual world.
It is the world.
And mark my words, as Queen Oprah said, a billion pockets,
y'all.
Also, 50 million wrists.
So maybe soon, a million faces?
You know Apple will create a device that
works with the AR kit, to take it from here to here.
Then we can fake it until we literally can make it.
Making the show, I spent a lot of time
driving up and down the coast of California.
Because one, it's beautiful.
And because, two, both San Francisco and Los Angeles
have some amazing science that I want to explore.
But I also want to enrich my brain
while I'm driving, which is why I love audiobooks.
There's never been a better time to start listening on Audible.
Audible has the largest selection
of audiobooks on the planet.
And because you watch UnoDoseofTrace,
you get a 30-day free trial that also supports the show,
when you go to audibletrial.com/trace,
or text TRACE to 500-500 A whole month for free.
This year, I've decided to only read books by women,
and most recently I listened to Buried Beneath the Baobab Tree
by Adaobi Tricia Nwabani.
And this was a powerful book about girls kidnapped
by Boko Haram in Nigeria.
It's got unusual and gripping writing, a gut-wrenching story,
and wow!
What an ending!
Anyway check it out.
There's never been a better time to start listening on Audible.
Now, with Audible Originals, the selection
has gotten even more custom, with content made for members.
Audible-- the most inspiring minds,
the most compelling stories, the best place to listen.
Again, go to audible.com/trace, T-R-A-C-E,
or text TRACE to 500-500.
Listen for a change.
And remember, it supports the show, which is good for you,
and good for me.
So thanks.
Now, obviously VR is having and has had a big moment right now.
And I didn't mention it, because I
thought you might want to check out Milan's video--
The ScienceVerse He gathered a bunch of different ways
that VR is being used to help us cope with the human condition
while we wait for volumetric technology to catch up.
What if I told you that we could integrate ourselves
into our own imagination with VR,
and even improve both our physiological
and psychological well-being by doing so?
That's because we are.
VR's ability to be a game-changer in neuromedicine
is amazing.
So amazing I've decided to dedicate
an entire video on my channel to explaining how.
So be sure to hop onto the ScienceVerse
in this two-part collab.
And of course, do be sure to subscribe to my friend
Trace Dominguez, because, well, his channel's pretty dope, too.
Everyone, thank you so much for tuning into UnoDoseofTrace.
I am about to head out on a huge trip
to film some Hello Science episodes.
So make sure you come follow me over on Instagram so you
can see all the adventures and maybe
guess what episodes are coming, because they're so exciting.
OK.
So with that, thanks again for watching.
Please come join the Patreon.
Help support the show.
You can help support me out on these adventures.
And I will see you in the future.