Holographic technology adds a new start-up dimension

If you’re someone who dreads conference calls, there’s a new development that will have you squirming in your seat.

Nasser Peyghambarian, of the University of Arizona, say he and his colleagues have developed a  new form of holographic technology that can project a near-perfect 360 degree image to another location.

“We foresee many applications including, for example, car or airplane manufacturing. They can look at the hologram and design the system they have in real-time and look at the model and make changes on it as they go,” he says.

Peyghambarian says surgeons around the world would also be able to participate in complex operations at the same time.

To create the hologram, cameras take colour images at multiple angles and send them over an Ethernet line, which is a series of frame-based computer networking technologies for local area networks.

In the lab model, images are projected onto a transparent plastic panel and refreshed every few seconds.

Future displays will lie flat on a table and the system will create an optical illusion that the image is floating above the screen.

The technology builds on earlier work by the same group, which in 2008 reported a black and white 3-D image that could be updated every four minutes. The new system is more than 100 times faster.

Such incredible innovation opens up multiple start-up opportunities. Imagine the effect of holographic technology on a playing field, on stage or at large-scale events.