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Researchers have been creating holograms for decades—yet they've struggled to make them practical. Among the biggest challenges: the traditional crystalline photographic materials used to capture holographic images are expensive and have trouble covering large areas. Two years ago, Nasser Peyghambarian, an optics researcher at the University of Arizona, Tucson, and his colleagues overcame these limitations when they devised a polymer-based holographic film that was potentially far cheaper than the conventional materials and also easier to grow in large areas. Moreover, the researchers were able to write new images every 4 minutes. But that was hardly a moving picture. So Peyghambarian and his colleagues continued to search for improvements.

In their new paper, published online today in Nature, Peyghambarian and colleagues at Arizona and the Nitto Denko Technical Corp. in Oceanside, California, describe a holographic display that can depict a scene in another location and update the image nearly in real time. The setup starts with 16 cameras arranged in a semicircle around a target. The cameras take simultaneous pictures of the target every second. The camera views are processed by a computer and sent via an Ethernet cable to the photographic recording site, which conceivably can be in the next room or half way around the globe. There, a laser setup receives the image data and shines a steady stream of pulses encoding the images as well as laser light from a reference beam at an improved polymer film, which in turn records the resulting interference pattern. A separate light is then shown from an angle on the other side of the polymer film, generating the hologram as it does so.