Move over Tu-Pac, Touchable Holograms are the new thing

Yoichi Ochiai is a researcher at Japanese company Digital Nature Group, that has created holograms using femtosecond lasers that are not only safe to touch but are holograms you can interact with.

The holograms themselves are created using a laser that sends out ultra-short bursts of light. The technical terms for how ultra-short they are is referred to as femtoseconds (a quadrillionth of a second) – pretty short, right? The laser is then focused on air molecules, giving them just enough energy to ionize and create light called plasma.

The ability to interact with this plasma happens when someone touches the plasma, triggering a programmed change, like checking a box. Digital Nature Group calls the displays that the lasers create “fairy lights” because the lights are so small that they kind of look like they were made by pixies.

Touching the plasma is similar to touching sandpaper so it’s not completely invisible like more holograms. The fact that there is an actual sensation associated with the hologram opens doors to many new possibilities. Maybe not at the level of something like tractor beams and lightsabers just yet, but it’s a step closer to the types of things you see in sci-fi movies.

If you want the real technical explanation of how the touchable holograms work, they lay it out in their YouTube page as follows: