This was a major milestone for holography because laser technology serves as the basis of some modern day holographic displays.
[1] 1986 – Musician, record Producer and entrepreneur Christopher Martin Pati was the first person to theorize and propose a practical and quantitative process for plasma holography.
His method involved exciting oxygen and nitrogen molecules with ultraviolet laser light (slightly above the visible light spectrum but below the x-ray spectrum) to create a plasma screen area (requiring no reflective surface, screen or special glasses) to create the holographic image.
[2][3] 1989 – MIT spatial imaging group pioneered electroholography, which uses magnetic waves and acoustic-optical sensors to portray moving pictures onto a display.
2011 – DARPA announces the Urban Photonic Sand Table (UPST) project, a dynamic digital holographic tabletop display.
They were first developed in 2005 by the University of Texas, utilizing a series of powerful lasers that focus light in desired positions in order to create plasma excitations with the oxygen and nitrogen molecules in the air.
This type of holographic display is capable of producing images in thin air, without the need for any sort of screen or external refraction media.
The laser plasma display is able to depict very bright and visible objects, but it lacks in terms of resolution and picture quality.
The piston display, invented by Belgian company IMEC in 2011, utilizes a MEMS (micro-electro-mechanical system) based structure.
In this type of display, thousands of microscopic pistons are able to be manipulated up and down to act as pixels, which in turn reflect light with a desired wavelength to represent an image.
This method of display partially compromises the image in certain viewing angles, but it requires much less computational power and data transfer.