Eight years ago, when Dior dazzled the Fashion realm with a 3D holographic ‘I Feel Blue’ immersive catwalk experience at the West Bund Art Centre in Shanghai, it pushed the boundaries of brand and the power of visual communication. The 30x8 metre massive holographic projection floated floral prints in poetic poise with five-metre tall models in hyper-reality of mirage-like hypnosis of illusion. Much has rapidly evolved with technology ever since its emergence in the public domain, with holograms holding endless fascination with form and spatial sight for all ages. Immortalised and spurred by science fiction, television, and celluloid, 3D avatars and notions of beamed ‘back to the future’ teleportations have crossed over dimensions and dreams with dizzying adaptations to human creativity.
The first successful demonstration of holographic technology was created by Dennis Gabor in 1947, made from a photographic plate covered with a thin layer of silver and subject to interference from a heavily filtered mercury arc beam. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1971.
Holograms have evolved in the last seven decades from Pepper’s ghost to other optical illusions, increasingly gaining traction in the digital realm. A million-trillion pixels are essentially needed to create true 3D holographic displays. 3D holograms are still ways from becoming incorporated in consumer electronics, given the limitations of modern hardware in imprinting and processing vast amounts of quantum data stored in photons (particles of light), let alone recreating it at the 30 frames per second – considered standard in American television displays.
The global holographic display market alone is estimated to be $13.31 billion in 2025 and is expected to grow substantially to $107.24 billion by 2033. Key growth drivers are spurred by applications in healthcare, advertising, automotive, video gaming and entertainment, as well as consumer electronics, with a much wider, robust growth trajectory of $234 billion by 2033. Much of the demand and exciting new developments are being spawned in the Asian tech sector. Faster super-chips and quantum leaps in computation are giving wings to experimental research and holographic simulations in defence, space sciences, education, navigation, architecture, aviation, entertainment, oceanography and the nano-world of robotics and medical innovation.
There are different approaches to holographic adaptations in virtual communication. Avatar technologies based on artificial intelligence (AI) are used to generate a photo-realistic representation of a user, to visually generate what is referred to as ‘stereotypical holograms’ or synthetic avatars. These holograms provide some level of immersion, but in comparison with other options, do not offer a high level of presence or a natural 3D appearance of the user.
Camera-generated holograms inch a bit closer to achieving what avatars often fall short of. It allows a near-cinematic experience, allowing studio recordings for real-time capture of holograms from multiple camera angles to generate a real representation of users, as opposed to avatars. These give high-definition equivalence and create a convincing sense of immediacy between the users and the manifested holograms, due to the level of detail and interaction. It does, though, involve a complex installation of a broad range of devices in a dedicated location and, therefore, has limitations for rapid deployment and reuse, negating scalability options.
An improvement in effective visualisation is achieved by capturing an image using consumer-grade phones or tablets, aided by AI, to generate a full 3D holographic experience. Bleeding-edge capabilities compress video formats from 2 Gbps to 30-50 Mbps, reducing the demand over mobile networks. The compressed content gets transmitted to an off-the-shelf XR device, such as glasses, where the holographic stream is decoded and processed, before rendering in the user environment of choice and displaying it accurately and seamlessly within milliseconds. The holographic image is not a mirror replica of the user but is a high-fidelity digital equivalent that creates a stronger sense of realism and emotional connection between the users.
From volumetric display systems that create tangible, mid-air holograms by ionising air molecules to form interactive pockets of light to AI-induced reactive avatars responding to gestures and voice commands, projections have become a lot smarter and sophisticated than the holographic posthumous stage performance of Whitney Houston in Vegas from the 2020s.
The thrill of entering a virtual space as a holographic avatar and interacting with real-time variables of the physical realm is the singularity of the current paradigm. This synchronous congruence would be the promethean panacea that would ignite the digital core of an inert hologram. We are living in a digital age where our experiments with the elemental have set in perpetual motion our eternal quest for maya – an illusion designed to illuminate.