Having seen thousands of flat screens in your life. You can no longer perceive them. Put your eyes in front of a holographic display one time, however, and you’ll notice something strange: Your eyes are looking at a real object, not a picture of one. All of this is contained in that glimmer of doubt. It’s not about having “sharper” pixels. It is all about what constitutes that image and how your eyes are fooled into thinking that it is occupying real space.
How a Hologram Display Builds an Image Differently
You’re looking at the screen from the outside, and a flat screen depicts all of the pixels in one plane, regardless of what is happening in the scene. Physically, even a 4K screen is “one” light sheet.
This is not so with a hologram display. Light is either cast through a mesh or a transparent glass or even through a Pepper’s ghost enclosure so it appears to come from a point in open air instead. No surface on which the image exists physically. In space, you must look for it, just as you would do if you were looking for a real object on a table. That’s a totally different concept for image formation – it’s not like looking on a monitor or a stereo screen, where your eyes have to be fixed on a fixed plane.
Depth Cues: Why 3D Hologram Content Feels Real Without Glasses
Stereoscopic 3D: used in “old” film theaters and 3D TVs to trick the viewer into thinking they are seeing something in 3D by presenting one slightly different image to each eye. It does work, but it only works when the head is oriented in a specific way and it’s only based on one depth cue, binocular disparity. If you move your head, the illusion wobbles or breaks.
A 3D hologram doesn’t require any such conjuring. As you would expect the image does take up space and your eyes are receiving a number of depth cues simultaneously as you walk past them, the motion parallax, real occlusion of something passing in front and the changing of shadow and light and the perspective as you change the angle of view. These are the same cues that your brain relies on when determining distance in real life. The hologram looks real to an audience at various angles, but the stereoscopic 3D is convincing only to the audience sitting dead centre in the right seat.
The Viewer Experience Nobody Gets From a Flat Screen
This is what brands want to know. A person’s face is looking into a TV screen. A hologram display was observed, then walked around, then captured on a cell phone. No glasses, no headset, no seating chart, just people naturally finding themselves in the room, because something doesn’t look right floating there.
This alters what material is going to function, too. It’s a talking-head video, but it isn’t using any of the spatial depth that it offers, and thus looks flat and lifeless as a hologram. Content for holographic display must contain subjects separated from each other, clearly defined edges and real dimensionality, rather than a video file that has been taken from a different screen.