Hollywood Ruined Holograms

should just be right around the corner room. We're always disappointed when it doesn't happen. Yeah, where's my Layah hologram? Honestly? But yeah, you're talking about Princess Leah. Are there any other layers that are critical too? Sure? There are some people with some very nerdy parents who, yes, are named Leia. Correct, you're correct. I'm sorry. I didn't mean to invalidate all of you layers out there. No, No, I don't want to invalidate any layers anywhere, but I do want to

talk about holograms and uh. You know, do you guys remember the story about Tupac headlining over at Coachella. Yeah, they said it was a hologram. Didn't they know he was on stage with Snoop Lion. He's now SNOOPO used to be Snoop Dogg. No, I understand, I know who it is. Okay, all right, you're looking at me like just like I just wasn't sure that he. I just knew he was performing on stage with somebody. Yeah, No, he was on stage, or really an image of him

was on stage. Of course, Tupac himself was sadly no longer with us, and that, of course, was the big deal, was the fact that there was a person who was once alive and now no longer alive performing at Coachella, And it looked like kind of a hologram sort of thing, and that's what everyone called it. Well, wait a minute,

so I heard it was a hologram. It's not. Why not, because it really was just a sort of a well, kind of a sub set of an old trick called Pepper's Ghost, which is a trick that's used by magicians. It's used in haunted houses, it's used in dark rides. Uh, And it's a way to create an illusion so that you have sort of a transparent figure that seemingly can interact with a real physical setting and uh and the

way it works is pretty pretty nifty. Um and and the the best manifestation of this that I have seen is that the Disney ride the Haunted Mansion. So for you Disney fans out there who are listening to this podcast who absolutely do not want to have the magic ruined, I will suggest that you skip ahead on this podcast because I'm going to tell you how a certain effect works. And once you know it, you can never unknow it. So um, I know that some people take that very seriously.

So and by the way, the Easter Bunny is real fair enough, So you go through the Haunted Mansion ride. One of the big sequences in this ride is a ball where there's a giant birthday party going on. There's some ghosts dancing, there's a ghost playing a pipe organ. You see some ghosts uh portraits dueling with pistols, um, other ghosts appear to be circling chandelier. A lot of stuff is happening in this one sequenceeous it looks great.

And all the ghosts are these transparent figures that are moving around what looks like an actual three dimensional scene, and so it's kind of it can be a little confusing, like how did they do that? It's actually very simple. So the setting is real. There's a real table there there, there's a real uh, chandelier, chandelier, pipe organ, all these kind of things are actually there. But all the figures

you see are actually just reflections. There's a pane of glass between the ride vehicles and the setting where the table is and all that, uh, and then below you and above you on you know, right along the same parallel as the as the track you are on, there are animatronic figures that are lit so that they will reflect off the glass. The ride part that you are in is very dark, so you don't see your own

reflection or else that would ruin the illusion. There's also a scrim there that kind of cuts down on the glare so that you can't tell that there's a reflection going on. By controlling the lighting in that section above and below you, you can make the ghosts appear to fade in and fade out of existence. The brighter it is,

the stronger the reflection is. The dimmer it is, the more weak the reflection, so they start to look like they are becoming more and more insubstantial as the lights go down right right, the same way that if you've ever seen on TV if they're interrogating suspect and on one side of a one way mirror, and if the lights come up on the other side, then you can

see who's through the other end. Right, that's considered a bad thing, usually usually played to great comedic effect and things like but but yeah, that's how that that illusion we're because it's just a reflection. So you've got the dark part of the ride, so you can't see your own reflection. You've got the parts that are lit up above you and below you, those are blocked out from your view by the floor and ceiling of the actual

ride track that you are on. And then you're looking into a room and seeing the reflection, and that gives you the illusion that there are ghosts wandering around. Now. In the case of Tupac over at Coachella, it was a variant of this particular trick, uh and it's very similar, but it does require a slightly different setup. It's called the Musion eyeliner, which is actually a proprietary tech. It's done by this one company. Is that is that the projection or the film or both. It's it's really the

projection method. So at the stage at Coachella, you have you have the stage itself where the people are all dance and round, singing and stuff. In front of the stage is a screen that's that's on the ground, so it's not it's not mounted vertically. It's mounted so that it's actually on the ground itself, flat against the ground. You've got a frame that's in front of the stage that that supports a screen that's tilted at a forty

five degree angle toward the audience. So the base of the screen or foil as as Musian Eyeliner calls it, the base of the foil is on the edge of the stage. The top of the foil is mounted to a sort of a lattice that's in front of the stage, and it's transparent so you can see through it. So if you're standing in front of the stage, there's just the screen that you probably aren't really noticing, particularly if it's if it's dark, uh, And so you can see

everything that's happening on the stage just fine. Well, you've got a projector also mounted at the top of the the you know, the structure that's holding the screen up it's projecting down onto the ground, so that screen that's

flat on the ground, it projects onto that. The foil reflects that projection, so that from the perspective of the audience there appears to be a three dimensional moving figure up there on stage that's ghostly in nature, because of course you can see through the screen, so it's sort of this transparent kind of figure that's moving around, and it can seem to move through the same physical space as the people who are actually on the stage. It's all on illusion, but yeah, it's just a matter of

perspective right now. I'd imagine if you're a performer who's up there on the stage with the image of Tupac, you you're not seeing anything interacting with him. Maybe you're seeing you're seeing a little bit of light on the screen. Yeah, you might see, you might see the foil in front of you. You probably could see where it was being projected, but you wouldn't, Yeah, you wouldn't look to your right

and suddenly see a ghostly performer standing there. And that's one thing I think we need to keep in mind as we're going through the rest of this podcast is the idea that um when we're talking about three D imaging. It turns out most of the time what we're actually talking about is something that is going one way. Is it's a forced perspective. Is if you are sitting and looking from one direction, it appears three D and right. You wouldn't always know that. But we we can get

to the Hollywood misconceptions in a bit. Well. For instance, if you were staying to the side of that stage, if you were looking at the stage from like your ninety degrees off, so you're looking from the left or right side, you could see that there are people on the stage dancing. You would see that there's a screen that's that's tilted out toward the audience, and that's all you would see. You would not see a ghostly figure

at all. You might see that there's a projector that's beaming something down, but you wouldn't be able to tell what it was. There'd be no three dimensionality to it um and you wouldn't even know necessarily that there was the ghostly figure of two pack cor dancing around on stage. It only appears to have volume from one direction. It

doesn't actually have depths exactly. Yeah, you couldn't walk around it you know it, it would only be it would only work as long as you were in the right position, which is why this works great for things like haunted houses and rides where the perspective, Yeah, you're pretty much stuck with one point of view. You can't change that easily in most of these And the same thing with

magic tricks. You know you you have designed this so that people can look at it in one particular way, and so it doesn't matter if it doesn't work any other way because no one's ever going to be in that position to see it. So we should probably explain if Tupac wasn't a real hologram. What is a hologram? When people use that word, what what are we actually talking about? So hologram is essentially a three dimensional representation

of some sort of object. And the way it works is using one of my favorite things in the world, lasers, or really just one laser. Use a laser and a beam splitter to split that laser beam into two, and use mirrors to direct exactly where those beams go. And you have two, these two beams that perform very important functions.

One of them is the object beam. Now this is the B beam that you direct, and you actually also use a lens to to diffuse the light in fact, to scan over an object, whatever the object is that you want to make a hologram of, and so that light then hits the object, some of it gets reflected back to this holographic medium, whether it's film or some sort of digital representation ship. Right, and in the in the good old days of holograms, we're talking holographic film,

which is very very sensitive. It's got very high resolution for different different grades and phases of light. Your other beam is a reference beam which reflects and then is projected directly onto the holographic film, never having encountered the object. So you've got these two different beams for reference, right, You've got the well, you've got the one for reference in the one of the object one, and then uh that ends up being the basis of the holographic image

that gets captured on the film. So what you're actually recording is the interference between these two beams. How a clean fusion of the beam interacts with uh, the waves of light that passed over the object. Right. And so then what you do is, once you've developed this holographic film or processed it through digital means whatever you have a physical representation you've got, like the picture, the holographic picture in front of you, in whatever medium you've used,

usually it's clear plastic film. Uh. Then you have to use the same sort of light you used as your your your object being a reference beams so that you can recreate that that um that instance and get the effect. Otherwise you're just you're just looking at noise signal. Yeah, you're not looking at anything in particular, you know, it's

just it's just clear plastic film. So you illuminate with the proper type of light, and the effect is that you get a three dimensional object that looks like it's right behind that plastic film, like like the plastic film is almost like a window, right and uh, and that you can it's something that you feel like you can even walk around it. And depending upon how you process the um the image and how you're displaying it, you might be able to walk around and see slightly different

versions of that thing. Most of the time, you're getting something that's always forward facing because every single aspect of that holographic film, uh is captured in every piece of that holographic film. In other words, every section of that holographic film has the information of the entire picture inside

of it. Right. You can even you can even rip a hologram in half and in each half see the exact state image, right, although every time you rip it you're going to degrade the right, You're you're going to have the resolution right. So, but but you can also do things like take several different images, represent them as holograms, and then through the process of just moving through a space,

create the illusion of movements. So in other words, there's a famous hologram where it's a woman who appears to be blowing a kiss as you walk around this and uh, and it's done the same way you would do a hand drawn animation. It's just a series of these photos done as holograms, and as you move through the space, it seems to move. But that's all I can do. Like, you can either make it make the the image appear to blow a kiss or catch a kiss and shove it into the lips, I mean, take a kiss back.

Those are your two choices. Yeah, I always walked in the wrong way, so lonely, um, but yeah, that's uh, that's your basic hologram. I mean, that's the thing is that that's what a hologram is. That you're using these lasers to really um to explore through light the dimensions of of an object and then capture that in some medium. That's all hologram really is, Whereas what we're kind of

used to thinking of as holograms isn't necessarily that. I mean, it's it's it's almost more of a problem of vocabulary than anything else, right, I mean, people use the word hologram when really I think what they're talking about is is pretty much any kind of three D image rey or three D projection. Yeah, yeah, exactly, So there are other means of three D projection to have nothing to do with holograms. You know, you don't have to use the laser beams or splitters or anything like that in

order to generate the effect. The Pepper's Ghost one is a great example. There's no lasers involved in that. I mean, I guess you could throw lasers in there if you wanted to, but there's no reason for them. But with the Pepper's Ghost, I mean, in that instance, there's actually nothing even three D about the image, right, It just appears to uh right, right, You're you're looking at a reflection. But then there's nothing three D about a reflection either.

I mean, that's the way Pepper's Ghost works, It's the way where a lot of holograms work. When you look into a reflection and you see a reflection of yourself, there's that illusion of depth, there's an illusion that light is coming at you, even though it's just really bouncing off to cracting off of various surfaces that make it seem as though. Right. What I'm talking about is um

is for the viewers. So if you look at a Pepper's Ghost projection and you move around to the left or right of your position, it's still it's just gonna it's just a reflection, just a reflection. You're just going to be move around. It's not going to appear as a three D object would, Which is why, which is why they force your point of view in most of

these uh instances of Pepper's ghosts. They don't want you to If you were to move to the side, you would just see that there's a pane of glass between people and a thing. Right, But there are ways to to create that three D illusion, right, to actually make so you know, I'm looking dead on and if I move my head over to the left. I see a

little bit more to the left of the supposed image. Um, and it simulates the effect of three D volume even though we're still just looking at a projection coming from a screen. There's there's volumetric display, and volumetric display. Is this idea that you use a three dimensional display as opposed to the Planer displays P L A, N A R displays that we're used to. That's, you know, something you would have on your computer or your television or

movie screen or whatever. This would be a display that itself had three dimensions, and so you would project things on it. It would essentially still be two dimensional projections on a three dimensional object, but that would give it the three dimensionality. That's kind of cheating. It is. It is cheating, and it's it's exactly cheating. And uh. And we've talked about the possibility of using things like missed or fog to project things on, but again, you're not

we can't tell the projection. Hey, I want you to hit this one particle that's floating, this bit of particulate matter that's floating in the air, but don't hit the ones that are in front of it. Because I need you to to simulate depth. You can't really do that. We can't. We can't yet. Yeah, well yeah, I mean the idea of projecting into a fog or suspended mist is interesting, but we're not there yet in in terms of really creating something that that has a convincing volume

to it. You can can specificity of our of our projection is not anywhere and and and controlling something like a fog or missed in a way where it doesn't reveal to the viewer that that's why it is as tricky as well. I will say that, Uh, there was another Disney ride that I loved very much. Uh was that Disneyland Flying Elephants. That was what I loved when I was a kid. I don't like. I don't like waiting three hours to write on it now. Um No,

spinning teacups, awesome ride, fantastic. Don't ride that more than three times in a row, people, I speak from experience. No, I'm talking about the Indiana Jones ride, which is at Disneyland,

not at disney World. Um. And at Disneyland, that one part of the ride, it involves going through this dark tunnel and at the end of the dark tunnel is a wall and on that wall or all these rats crawling across it, and the vehicle you're on is going very quickly towards that wall, and you're thinking, oh God, Tom, turn it the last second, that'll be exciting, But instead you go through it, and when you go through it, you realize that the whole thing was a projection that

was done on Missed. Now, since then they've done similar things with the Pirates of the cab En ride where they'll project like Davy Jones's face on Missed before you go through it. But that was the first time I'd ever experienced that effect, and the particular day I went it was working really well. So I was genuinely surprised when it happened. And though we should say that effect

is too deep projection, it was too deep projection. It was in the dark, and it was fast because I was on a fast moving ride, so you're not going, you know, you don't have a long enough moment to sit there and really evaluate exactly. All you see is rats. Wow, that was cool. That's That's about how fast it went. So so this brings us to something that we wanted to talk about, which is the misconceptions that we get when we're our ideas are fed by Hollywood, right, the

whole Star Wars Princess Leiah hologram. Right. And I was actually trying to figure out why when I started doing research for this holograms. You know, the three D projections and holograms that I was finding, even the state of the art ones were nothing like the idea I had. Is just a kind of a shallow consumer of science fiction.

And I think that's because the movies, um do not effectively communicate the idea that, as far as we know, three D imaging is really shackle too screens to some form of actual physical medium that you can't just project light into a space and have it be coherent in any way until we have a transparent nanobot army that we can use to reflect images off of. But it's true, I mean here, which we don't even need to reflect

at that point. The nano bots themselves just take on whatever color they need, and then because they're nanobots, they're already got an amazing resolutions, So really they just form whatever, Like your idea twenty years away, Yeah, it's always away, yeah exactly, um No, but I mean so we can think of a few in the movies. I mean, there's

tons of these things. But if you think of in Star Wars, like you mentioned earlier, Lauren, Princess Leah, or They or the Chess set, these are uh if it seems to have a little base and then coming up out of it, yeah, right, and it seemed, well, what it is is the thing that's amazing about it is the full simulation of volume from every angle, not attached to a screen. Right. So in other words, so it's

not it's not taking advantage of your perspective. Right. You could walk around this thing and see it from any angle and it would be as if there were an actual person or thing in the room with you, not just a projection. So yeah, it seems to have all the qualities of an actual, real object. It's just it's one made out of light. But there's some obvious problems

with this. I mean, we can project images that appear three D from a certain perspective, but um, you can't just project something into thin air and then make it stop right here. If we could, if we could control light like that, then lightsabers would be a thing. It's the same problem with lightsabers right, how do you turn on a lightsaber and have the light stop at saber length as opposed to just being a really destructive flashlight,

you know. I mean that's the same sort of problem with the laser if you prefer be a laser gun, but with a lightsaber handle instead of an unstead of a gun handle. Um. Now, in the world of Star Wars, we can explain it by saying magic, because come on, it's really what Star Wars is. But there are other there are other instances of this. I mean I was mentioning before the show Bones, the Sri television series Bones.

It's you know, a forensic, uh procedural kind of show, and in almost every episode, at some point they have a uh they go and look at this holographic display, which is this three dimensional display that shows whatever they need to look at in all dimensions. They can manipulate in any way, and it's within their actual physical space.

I've never seen it, so it's it's like fully with volume and they can Yeah, it's it's like a it's like a giant like fish tank of a hologram that they can just go up to and and you know, the characters are standing all around it. And you can see straight through this image to the other people behind it,

and everyone is seeing the same is rotating around it. Well, I actually I think that might be more feasible than the Princess Leiath thing, because you've got to contain, right, if you've got a container with with like glass on all sides, then I think in that case, with some really advanced projection technology and resolution, it might be possible to say, well, we can contain the illusion of an

image within this glass area. And and and I especially if it were you know, maybe not quite cylindrical, but but many sided, you could project a slightly different image onto each pane of glass create the illusion that you're going all the way around an object right right in person. If you were to walk around it, it would not look nearly as impressive as the depiction in the television series.

But then again, you know, everything's heightened for entertainment. I mean, we understand that, but it's it's again another sort of misrepresentation of what three D imaging really is. Well, and clearly they've been doing this for a while. I mean we mentioned Star Wars, and that was the s and then uh and then you see going through uh, one

was total recall made. It was like something two thousand eleven. Right, is the original one with the one with believe that people defend the original Okay, oh, we're about to fight the original one after the show, the original one with Honold he they've got they've got a hologram in that movie, right, a quote hologram, Right, But it's it's it's it just

walks around with everybody. Well in the series of In the British comedy series Red Dwarf, one of the main characters is a hologram, although that's simply played by an actor who's really moving around in the space um and then only occasionally does stuff move through him where they you know, have to shoot some sort of effects of that, right, right, or the doctor on a voyager, yeah, holographic medical and and none of these rely on screens in the way

that every hologram exactly something. There's some form of coherent light. But by Star Trek, you've got the idea of the holodeck where you're in this this four dimensional holographic environment that you know, but they also have replicators so they can make whatever they need it. It's funny how much we want this because people I keep seeing online how everybody keeps announcing now we've got the full Princess Leia hologram right around there's new news. It's it's like, no,

this one, this one for real. Yeah, they keep promising what we're seeing in the movies and then you look into it and it's like somebody overhyped this. What what you're talking about In each case is still just like, um, this is a sort of better hologram than the one before, or not hologram they use the word that fancier screen or I was looking at this one in the Guardian. The headline is Princess Leia Hologram could become a reality,

and it's talking about something. Uh. They're doing Hewlett Packard Labs. And I don't mean to downplay their achievement all. I mean, yeah, they have created an amazing screen, uh for for simulating really really good three D and you can move your head all around it. It's got a lot of range of vision. You know, you can go in that almost full semicircle around the screen um to see it. Uh. And so so I don't mean to downplay at all

what they've done, but it's not print. I mean it's still a screen, right, Yeah, I think I think, uh, we're probably limited by screens for the foreseeable future. I mean not to say that someone won't someday figure out ways of telling light who's the Boss and and maybe projecting a three dimensional, you know, entertainment right there in your room, perhaps an episode of Who's the Boss. I'm sorry,

I was, I was waiting Joe. Joe just stared at me in shell shockhar and Lawrence just snickering, just like the The Angel. The horrible, painful setup of that went so long. That's that's my gig, man, that's my gig. I do long setups and talk about it. Yeah. Yeah, all right, and then we podcast about it. That's awesome. No, No,

it's I think all of that's really relevant information. I mean the idea that since we already have the preconceived notion that this is where we're headed, the Princess Leiah hologram, whatever you want to call it, then it's understandable that that's how people report on it because it immediately conveys information to the reader. Because that's one of those touchstones

that most people are familiar with. I do wish they would come up with a different term, although we also have to admit the fact that language is plastic, it's flexible, and sometimes words eventually start to mean things that they did not originally mean. So I suspect, knowing the way people work, that hologram essentially will be you know, it's already colloquially used for three D projection, but it's gonna just that's just gonna be the name, the meaning of

the words. We'll just listen to how we've been using it now, even though we like just made the distinction. I mean, well, it's because that's what everyone calls it, not that I'm not saying it because that's what I think of I think it is. I'm saying because that's okay, Jonathan, Look, I'm just I'm speaking to the people using the language they use. I don't want to I don't want to lose folks after my hostage. Yeah, I support you, Okay, good,

all right? Well, Hey, you know what, I think I'm gonna wrap this up because I have the power to do that. This is a fun discussion though, holograms. That's really one of those interesting things. There's a great article on the How Stuff Works site about how holograms work, which really goes into amazing detail about how the light interacts to create this illusion of a three D image, um and and how your brain picks up some of

the work. Tracy Wilson wrote it, and it's it gets really deep into the physics if you're into that kind of thing. It nearly broke her. I remember when she was writing it. It was one of the ones that was There are a couple of articles on that site that were particularly difficult, and that was one of them. But it's really well done. She did a great job,

so I highly recommend checking that out. Also, if you want to get in touch with us, we have an email address that's f W Thinking at Discovery dot com. You can go to f W thinking dot com and uh and check out all of the blogs, the podcast, the video episodes, they're all up there. You can find links to our social media so you can follow us on Twitter or Facebook or Google Plus and get in touch with us. Let's know what what interests you about the future, what what what has you excited? What points

do you do you want us to cover. We're really eager to hear from you, and we look forward to talking to you again. Really soon. For more on this topic and the future of technology, visit forward thinking dot com, brought to you by Toyota. Let's Go Places,