They always felt gimmicky to me, like something out of a kid's museum, and I imagine I'm not the only one.

Its this odd often blurry and hard to see thing that certainly has interesting aspects but is not something you can create easily at home, unlike a photograph. Then the world changed and mobile devices ruled and everyone had a good camera sensor in their pocket, TVs were thinner and higher resolution than ever, games started looking amazing, etc and there really wasn't any room for less practical things like holograms.

I think its one of those things we just weirdly romanticize like a car that is also a boat or a jetpack, but in reality has no real place as a consumer product.

▲

JKCalhoun 2 hours ago | parent [-]

There were different degrees of quality with holograms. To my recollection, a hologram on glass, that you illuminated with a laser, were stunning in clarity and sense of three dimensionality.

All other variants were degrees of magnitude worse.

	▲	TheOtherHobbes 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		The Science Museum in London used to have a life-sized holoportrait of Denis Gabor. It looked like a milky plate until you pushed the button that turned on the laser, and... there he was. Stunning. There was a short-lived flurry of art establishment interest in high quality glass holograms, but the process is just too expensive and fragile to create non-niche art. I always expected that at some point we'd have dynamic holographic displays, but the processing and resolution requirements are insane. Holographic film has a resolution in the region of 100,000 to 250,000 ppi, which is quite a bit more than 300dpi for print or a few thousand PPI for plain old film. If you could build a 27" display with that resolution you'd need maybe 1TB per frame at a minimum. You could probably apply quite a bit of compression to get that down on input, but that's still the order of a workable frame store memory. Multiply by three for colour.
	▲	Robotbeat 9 minutes ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		They're also useful for analytical purposes. It's possible to do this with digital methods, too, but the lower spatial resolution of most digital LCDs and most digital camera sensors (compared to film) limits it somewhat. But I think it'd be more practical than the analog film based analytical holograms.
	▲	2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		[deleted]