Holographic technology – once the stuff of science fiction, enabled with Nobel Prize-winning innovation, increasingly used in fields ranging from education and military planning to medicine and entertainment – is receiving attention as a potentially transformative workplace technology. Holograms are produced by an imaging process in which lasers capture and replicate objects into detailed three-dimensional projections of diffracted light that preserve the depth of the original physical source it displays. It is, one observer says, “the intersection of light and matter, designed to be observed from all perspectives.” The current state of the art comprises two laser beams collaborating to create solid light holographs in 10 billion pixels per square meter in ultra high definition. Hungarian-British physicist Dennis Gabor pioneered holographic technology, winning a Nobel Prize in Physics in 1971. Providing a ‘magic window’ Holographic technology “works like a magic window, where users can talk, gesture and make eye contact with another person, life-size and in three dimensions,” says Andrew Nartker, director of product management at Google, whose Project Starline aims to create 3D projections that give workers to appearance of speaking to each other across a window. Star Wars aficionados may have been introduced to holograms with Princess Leia’s distress call in the movie franchise’s first installment in 1977. An ABBA “reunion” in 2022 featured the band’s members projected as holograms. (Certain other concert projections of music legends reflected 2D images off a semi-transparent surface in an effect known as Pepper’s Ghost. Lacking depth and volume, they weren’t true holograms, contrary to popular belief.) Expanding business applications And now, this technology is providing new resources for the business world. For example, holograms can give retail shoppers 360-degree views of items. Models created with holograms help military decision-making by offering detailed visual assessments of...