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Believe it or not these holographic floating plasma displays aren’t new. They just haven’t reached the market yet, because.. well, if you touch the images you get burned. However, thanks to researchers at Tokyo university, more touch friendly floating plasma displays are now possible.



These kinds of displays work by heating molecules in the air.

The problem used to be just that, they got so hot that they burned you. This was because they used nano-second lasers to heat the molecules. This new technology uses femtosecond lasers instead.



A femtosecond is one millionth of one billionth of a second, whereas a nanosecond is one billionth of a second. These shorter pulses can’t damage your skin, making the final product touchable.

At this point, the researchers’ femtosecond lasers can only render images up to eight cubic millimeters in size, with resolutions reaching up to 200,000 voxels per second. They’re hoping to scale the technology up in the future, though.

Star Trek holohodecks are just around the corner, provided you combine this with Ultrahaptics and this holodeck software.