Remember a movie long, long ago and far, far away? Star Wars - the first… The little hologram of Princess Leia looked like something so far in the future! Was that movie really 30 years ago?

Large-scale, rewritable holograms are no longer the future, they are now. The next generation of holograms - the kind you can walk around and all but touch - are in development now.

MIT Technology Review reports that Nasser Peyghambarian, an optical engineer at the University of Arizona, Tucson, and his partner, Savas Tay, have modified a plastic used in optical communications systems that can have the way it bends, or refracts, light changed using laser beams.

The new material, developed by researchers at the University of Arizona and at Nitto Denko Technical Corporation, in Oceanside, CA, could eventually allow for life-sized displays of people and objects the size of cars that could be refreshed every few minutes.

The result is a hologram that you can see from all sides or a crowd of people can view at the same time. Current technology projects the image towards the viewer meaning that the viewer couldn’t walk around the image and the image is limited to viewing by one person rather than a group.

For you everything you want to know about holograms, just visit Wikipedia here>>