"Help me ObiWan Kenobi, you're my only hope!"
That is a phrase any Star Wars fan is more than familiar with. That little image of Princess Leia, being projected in mid-air by the rotund droid, R2-D2 represents a technological dream we've had as old as pop-culture itself: Holograms.
Although, this "far-fetched" dream is no longer so far away, it seems. The people of The Looking Glass company are bringing holograms closer to reality than ever before. They call this marvel of the modern world HoloPlayer One ( most probably an homage to Ernest Cline's book "Ready Player One"), which works by projecting a "super stereoscopic image" against a beam splitter, which then gets projected into a screen and finally, projected into the space before the user. It's a complicated process, so I'll let them explain:
"The HoloPlayer One falls into the category of a light field display using a two-stage optical system we call lightfoldingTM. At the heart of the HoloPlayer One system is an LCD screen that sends 32 views of a given scene towards their designated directions simultaneously. This creates a “field of light”, which a scene that occupies the same physical volume would have given out. The field of light is then retro-reflected to form a real image outside of the HoloPlayer One, allowing the scene to exist in midair.
Since the 32 views are sitting there waiting to be viewed, latency issues commonly experienced in eye-tracking 3D display systems are eliminated by design. Being a light field display also makes the HoloPlayer One system very suitable for multiple viewers. Audiences within a 50-degree view cone will be able to see the same aerialized scene at the same time without the need for any head-mounted devices.
On the sensor side, the HoloPlayer One system is equipped with the Intel® RealSense™ SR300 depth camera. This allows users to interact with the aerialized scene in the most natural manner possible — grabbing, pinching, touching, swiping… just as anyone could do with an object floating in midair.
Except there is no real object there, just photons."
If all that science jargon got you a little bit confused, here's a video the Youtube channel Tested made with Looking Glass: