The title ’101…01101001011010?’ asks why hologram making so complicated?

It’s the question we’ve asked ourselves over and over. How do you make something that is not there there. How do you get light to stop in the middle of a room? It’s like trying to grab jello…only harder. (P.S. If you want to skip to how it all ended and how you can create your own holograms go here)

My goal as a kid was to be the inventor of holograms. As I grew older it seemed no one wanted the job, so I began researching them. Eventually I started experimenting until I realized it wasn’t going to happen without some help. I finally decided on which route to get to basic holograms that I could work with and test, so I hired an engineer to come up with the tricky details.

The engineer did some cool things with the project, but when I tried to assemble it, the blue prints were incomplete, instructions lacking vital details, and most of it didn’t make sense for how it worked, or why it was drawn up that way.

So here I am, stuck with faulty blue prints and thousands of dollars of equipment not in use. I decide to work towards it anyways, so with some other help, I redesigned it and began testing to see what we could come up with.

At first I have no idea where to go with it, we use part of the blue prints to build the end, and jury rig several pieces together to ignore the less then useful sections. The first test is sort of neat, but not all that great.

Research, trips to stores and an addition later. We get the unit ready for test #2.

At this point, there is a lot of tape, wires and bulky equipment. It takes 2 of us just to try it out because it can’t stand on it’s own. We have to turn the lights down low, use a near exact angle, but the new addition seems to make a difference. We use the most sentimental image to test it (Princess Leia in the white robe outfit of course). At first we see an outline that shows promise, and look around at different angles in the dark room. Then I see something that laid the path to the possible future of holograms. As I bend down, the outlines becomes more clear and I see an actual image floating in midair! The excitement at this point is bubbling over and both of us in the room start to celebrate that a mini-success has come..

Here is the first set of images shown that night. Princess Leia (left) and a red car (right).

Those were 2 of the images we saw that night, but of course it was only a start.

The rest of our hologram making story you may have heard, but you can see how far they have come here: