As we continue to live our lives, our technology and communication increase every single day before our eyes. Fifteen years ago who would’ve thought we’d have popular devices such as iPhones. We’ve gone from just regularly talking on the phone, to texting, and now we have applications like a FaceTime or other types of video chats through our cell phones. We can literally have video chats with anyone we want which is truly amazing. With Digital Communication and media, I feel like the next big thing is going to be holograms. Holograms are three-dimensional images formed by light beams coming from lasers or light sources. My reasoning behind why I feel holograms will be the next big thing for our future is because as the time goes on you can look at how far technology has already taken us in a matter of years. We never really expect what’s to come in our near future and some technology still amazes me. There are forms of holograms being used today and with using holograms I feel like it would substitute our way of communication and how we go on with our everyday life. The way I’m picturing it, the technology would coming projected straight through your phone or any form of projection and would be a hologram of any size of whoever you’re talking to or what you want to be able to show others. I thought of this while watching movies. I’ve been able to witness how much holograms can evolve.
Holograms could be used as maps, can save certain conversations and movements but better yet can save moments. Imagine wanting to go back to one of your favorite moments from a time in your life and now have the ability to look back at that time or watch someone express that message. Instead of having limited space on video when you can get the whole experience. According to theconversation.com, it is suggested that display holograms will be worth 5.5 billion dollars by the year 2020. Holograms will be able to improve training, designs, and visuals by being able to manipulate three-dimensional designs in its early form.
One of the ways holograms are being used is by military mapping. Militaries have been using holographic images to improve reconnaissance. There is a company named One American Company that has delivered 13 thousand 3D holographic maps for the US Army. With the US Army using holographic mapping, people are now able to see three-dimensional physical features of the land they will be on. The maps have been used successfully on transportation and help with disaster evacuations. You can also see how we already have maps on our cell phones which are pretty simple to use. Having a wider virtual map that you can interact with and see everything three-dimensional sounds much more helpful.
Holograms are also being used for information storage. Knowing how we constantly use up our storage, with apps, photos, videos and music, our computers itself are holding hundreds of our daily actions and all of this storage fills up. Our phones are now able to send our videos, pictures, and notes to the cloud offered by apple where you can pay as little as one dollar a month for five hundred gigabytes. With holographs recording and storing your information think about how much information could be recorded. They don’t necessarily have to record only visual objects, they can record your pure data which means holograms can obtain more data thank you can imagine. It’s said that prototypes can store 4.4 million individual pages of information and offer long-term security. Researchers have been looking for possibilities to use holographic data storage and as time continues to pass they get closer and closer to getting a usable system. Computing begins based on light rather than electricity. The goal is to one day make holographic storage a solution.
There have been people who get holograms made of them and their family and watching these memories back in a virtual reality headset. Being able to watch certain memories of your family or even looking around with a virtual reality headset and then seeing a two-year version of your kid just to make you see and feel how it felt to be at that time of your life. The idea of capturing memories is brilliant because I know a lot of people forget or wish they can be taken back to the moment of time. Now according to Lauren Goode (theverge.com), there have been programs where they create a natural language processing system where you can actually gain a conversation with the hologram and it wouldn’t give you typical robotic answers. At the Shoah Foundation, Goode was able to have a conversation with a still-living Holocaust survivor who is named Pinchas Gutter. It was a holographic two-dimensional display and she has stated that the conversation felt completely natural. This is just through a two-dimensional display, soon we’ll be able to see this as a three-dimensional figure that’s being projected. It’s very impressive that people have created ways for the old holograms to have conversations with you through their data.
To continue with how holograms are being used to improve our society and how the future will continue to invest their time and money into how we can evolve this idea of holograms, it has also helped medically. The way that holograms help are for MRI’s and Ultrasound scans. Instead of looking at a computer screen you can see the full projection of the body and it can be looked at with much better detail than whats already presented to us throughout computers. There is a company in Scotland that has been very successful with using the kind of data that produces 3D images for training. The beauty of this technology is that there will be no viewing devices or any special equipment to look through, it would just be a three-dimensional image in front of your eyes.
To think about how the future will be held on how we will carry our lives and what products we will be using. With the examples, I’ve given so far prove how much we would be relying on new things like three-dimensional images and how beneficial they would be for our future. From even going as far as video chatting with friends and family, just imagine how much more we can be able to see. I’d go as far as how it has been taken place in movies such as “Black Panther”. Whenever someone was to be called there would be a holographic image of the person’s head that would beam out of their watches or wristbands in order to have a conversation like facetime but you can see the person from the chest up and a full three-dimensional image of them. Not just of a computer screen or a phone. In regards to the media aspect, I feel like actual TV’s will be gone in the future as well. Maybe screen’s as a whole. I just believe everything will be projection through light going forward. The crazy thing is that we have seen a glimpse of how holograms work today. I can recall watching footage of a Tupac hologram during a Coachella performance in California. The hologram of Tupac was able to speak to the audience and perform some music to the point that it just felt very real. I have even seen holograms being used at events and a great example is when Rihanna launched a lingerie line, she threw an event in the city and had holograms of her all around doing different actions and posing with her new lingerie on.
This would be interesting because us humans see the world in 3D when our computer screens and televisions see it two-dimensional. Being in conference rooms and meets, it’s very beneficial for the people attending because this would be right in front of everyone. Even if you are out of town and want to be apart of a meeting, you can literally just project yourself into the conference room or where ever the meeting is taking place. This can help out a whole lot of business people who are constantly on the move and don’t have the time to travel to certain locations. As seen in the Avenger’s Infinity War this actually takes place. Having a meeting from the comfort of your own home sounds great to me especially and I’m sure I can speak for a lot of people when I say I rather work from home than be stuck in a conference room. It’s crazy how far us individuals can think to try to make these new inventions come to life so you can only imagine how different this world is going to be in the next twenty years. Having holograms to be used in our everyday life, the way we watch things may be different, the way we communicate may be different or even the way we process things may be very different than how we already do now.
Sources:
https://theconversation.com/five-surprising-ways-holograms-are-revolutionising-the-world-77886
https://www.theverge.com/2017/11/7/16613234/next-level-ar-vr-memories-holograms-8i-actress-shoah-foundation
https://www.computerworld.com/article/3249605/virtual-reality/the-future-of-3d-holograms-comes-into-focus.html
https://medium.com/@Goetz/holograms-and-the-the-future-of-meetings-a258eb777630
