Holographic TV on the Horizon

Don't be surprised if within our lifetime you find yourself discarding your plasma and LCD sets in exchange for a holographic 3D television, one capable of letting you watch just about any film or TV show you want. According to a report at CNN, the key to a new breakthrough that may enable you to do just that in only five to ten years lies in a rewritable and erasable holographic system made earlier this year by researchers at the University of Arizona.
Dr Nasser Peyghambarian, chair of photonics and lasers at the university's Optical Sciences department, told the news organization that scientists have broken a barrier by making the first updatable three-dimensional displays with memory.
"This is a prerequisite for any type of moving holographic technology. The way it works presently is not suitable for 3-D images," he said.The researchers produced displays that can be erased and rewritten in a matter of minutes.
There are no more great barriers to overcome now, Peyghambarian said.According to Peyghambarian, these holographic televisions could be constructed as a screen on the wall (like flat panel displays) that show 3-D images, with all the image writing lasers behind the wall; or they could be like a horizontal panel on a table with holographic writing apparatus underneath."Help me Obi-Wan Kenobi, you're my only hope."
Imagine a football match on your coffee table, or horror-movie villains jumping out of your wall. Or Princess Leia in glorious 3D standing right beside your beer can and popcorn.Meanwhile, Justin Lawrence, a lecturer in Electronic Engineering at Bangor University in Wales believes five to ten years is too optimistic to see consumer applications of this technology."It's one thing to demonstrate something in a lab but it's another thing to be able to produce it cheaply and efficiently enough to distribute it to the mass market," Lawrence said.
Nevertheless, according to the report, there are reasons to be optimistic that additional resources will be channeled into developing this technology more quickly, including a major financial push by the Japanese government to create three-dimensional, virtual-reality television by 2020.All of which, sound very, very cool.