Holograms

Holograms have been used in many movies for quite awhile now, and I've always kind of wondered if they could one day become reality. I would love to have a world with actual holograms like in Star Wars and Star Trek. I started looking around, and found out this world might not be as far off as many people think.

I found this picture at www.laser-magic.com. It still needs a projection screen, but it looks like an actual hologram of a screen. I also read about holograms at electronicdesign.com where it talks about hologram keyboards at places that require good hygiene like hospitals. The keyboards can detect finger presses for entries, but since there's nothing there except light, there's no germs spreading from touching it. It also talks about when we're going to get actual videos in hologram form. We have actually discussed that in our N100 class, and it raises the question of are we ready for it? Would it actually be more enjoyable to watch an action movie with explosions going on in our room? There's also the fact of it would scare many people because someone might walk into a room where someone left the hologram machine on and it looks like there's actual people the person doesn't know walking around in there house. The police might see an extreme jump in the amount of burglary reports. I believe it would be nice to have a would where you can have a message like the one in R2-D2 from Princess Leia, but whether or not we have hologram movies is undecided for me.