Learn more about why holograms are a scientific marvel.

The intricacies of Martin Scorsese’s face enthralled him. Every pore in the skin. Each tiny hair. Holographer Martin Richardson had made six holograms, or 3D images, of the renowned film director and this one, with its seemingly infinite detail, blew him away. As Richardson stared into the depths of Scorsese’s features, he felt as though the director was back in the room with him.

After studying it for hours, Richardson noticed that the hologram had even captured a tiny speck of dust floating in the air between Scorsese and the viewer. It was a perfect illusion made of light – a split second, trapped for eternity.

“It’s an addictive medium,” says Richardson, who has spent decades making holograms, gradually perfecting various methods.

From time to time, he takes one of his favourites out of storage to peer at it once more. “They send shivers down my spine,” he says.

Holograms are special. In order to understand them, it’s important to recognise what holograms are not, however.

The fantastical projection of Princess Leia in Star Wars, in which she famously pleads for help, is not a hologram. Nor is the stage trick known as a Pepper’s Ghost illusion, which allows translucent images of popstars to perform in front of live audiences.

Colliding waves

No, holograms are 3D images made by recording something called an interference pattern – think of it as the messy complexity that happens when two wave fronts meet.

You can create interference yourself by tapping the surface of water in a tray at two opposing points, and observing the collision of the tiny waves. The interference patterns generated by light reflecting from a 3D object are much more complex.

But, amazingly, by trapping a light interference pattern, on a photographic film or plate, say, and then shining fresh light on it, you can recreate the original wave front of light reflected by the object – or film director – that you captured when you recorded your hologram. It’s like a photograph that returns light in 3D.

People have used holography to make fantastical artworks, study tiny flaws in construction materials and even to make augmented reality glasses. The story of holograms is one of extraordinary creativity – but also, some argue, unfulfilled promises.

Coherent light from lasers

In the 1940s, Hungarian-British physicist Dennis Gabor was looking for a way to make detailed images of very small things. He was fascinated, for example, by electron microscopy – a Nobel Prize-awarded technique that relies on electron beams rather than light. Using it, scientists have made images of subjects including the microscopic hairs on insects’ bodies.

Gabor wanted to advance the technology and the method he came up with relies upon the essential principle of holography: it is possible to reconstruct a wave front – that is, the full complexity of electron waves or light waves reflected by a subject.

Although Gabor proved this was possible at the time, he was limited in that he needed sources of coherent waves – where waves travel with all their peaks and troughs in alignment. Electron beams in the 1940s were coherent but emitters of coherent light – lasers – would not emerge until the 1960s.

Two researchers at the University of Michigan, electrical engineer Emmett Leith and physicist-inventor Juris Upatnieks, developed Gabor’s concept of holography by leaps and bounds when they used lasers to make the first holograms that you or I might recognise as such, including a famous 3D image of a toy train.

Other researchers also made contributions to holography around this time but Gabor alone was awarded the 1971 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work in this field.

Holograms went on to wow and amaze. Canadian artist Natalie Logan remembers one of her early university classes in holography. The teacher had some holograms, made using a range of techniques all stemming from Gabor’s original idea. They varied in their depth and detail.

One, featuring a toy soldier, was so enchanting that Logan thought the teacher was playing a trick, showing the class a real 3D object to see whether they would spot the difference.

“When I realised it was a flat plate of glass, I was really shocked,” recalls Logan, who has gone on to make holograms herself.

A series of her works, called Trapped Light, features colourful holograms of strange and ethereal shapes. “I see a hologram as a container,” she says. “You are replaying what light did in that moment.”

Order out of chaos

It’s not easy to make a hologram.

“Oh my God, the hours I put in,” says Claudette Abrams, another Canadian holographic artist.

There are various methods but, to make a laser hologram of, say, a toy dinosaur, a holographer might use holographic film, a laser, a device to broaden its beams, and a beam splitter. Having two expanded beams to play with, the holographer shines one on the dinosaur, while the other passes by the dinosaur and remains pure. But the beams meet again at the recording film, creating interference.

Shine a fresh laser light on an appropriately made reproduction of the pattern, however, and its intricacies or undulations will diffract the light – cause it to deviate in many directions – in such a way as to perfectly replicate the wave front that came from the dinosaur during recording.

Why? Because you have recorded not just the intensity of light but also its phase, or how the dinosaur affected the light’s coherence – specifically, how those light waves either remained in sync or went out of sync as they bounced off the toy in various directions. That’s the trick of holography.

Abrams got interested in holograms as a way of playing with notions of reality and “how there are many virtual realities”, she explains.

She had fun making holograms of animals, freezing their expressions in time, for a series exploring how humans marginalise or monetise animals. “We had birds flying all over,” she recalls. “They pooped on some of the optics. It got messy.”

Data storage solution?

In the 20th Century, engineers harnessed the technology to make holographic recordings of materials.

If you wanted to find out whether a steel beam in a building, for example, had deformed or warped over time, you could make a hologram of it, wait a while, then make another hologram and superimpose the two to reveal the tiniest of changes in shape, or the emergence of any cracks or defects.

You can apply the same technique to everything from dental veneers to jet engine turbine blades.

But there are now many “simpler” alternatives, says Sean Johnston, professor emeritus at the University of Glasgow and author of Holographic Visions: A History of New Science, meaning that holographic interferometry, as it is known, has been largely superseded.

Another application of holography has also stumbled. Because holograms record far more information than a photograph, researchers have long experimented with using the technique for advanced data storage.

But Masud Mansuripur at the University of Arizona tells the story of InPhase, a company that aimed to commercialise holographic data storage on sophisticated disks – only to go bust in 2010.

“It was fantastic technology but there was no way it could compete in the market,” recalls Mansuripur, who explains that large solid-state drives emerged around the same time. They were far cheaper.

Holographic data storage could yet find a role in replacing magnetic tape storage, which is still used for very large data archiving applications.

Perfect imaging

Questions over holography’s usefulness date back to Gabor’s day. “It was overhyped and oversold right from the very start,” says Johnston.

The early, very impressive, laser holograms, such as those made by Leith and Upatnieks, were followed by rainbow transmission or embossed holograms. These are the kind you will find on your credit card and they remain useful as security features – it’s hard for someone to copy a hologram and the incredible detail it contains.

But this is arguably not a very spectacular use of the technology. Johnston has written that, over time, holograms were “relegated to children’s sticker books”.

And yet research leaning on the principles of holography continues. Augmented reality (AR) glasses use holographic optical elements, or HOEs.

These create vivid 3D images within a person’s field of view, by diffracting light in ways similar to a hologram. Such technology is helping to make AR devices smaller and more impressive. “You can superimpose an image against the real world,” says Mansuripur.

Whether you think holography has failed to meet expectations is perhaps a matter of opinion – Martin Richardson, for one, contests the idea. But, either way, there will always be astoundingly detailed holograms that those lucky enough to have seen them will never forget.

Johnston has a favourite: Lucy in a Tin Hat, a holographic portrait of a woman wearing large, shiny earrings and a strange, pointed head covering. Holograms such as these are windows through which you may observe the subject, says Johnston. And when they are that good, he adds, they are “the closest thing to the most perfect imaging medium ever made”.

By Chris Baraniuk, BBC World Service. This content was created as a co-production between Nobel Prize Outreach and the BBC.

Published June 2026

Nobel Prize laureate highlighted in this article

Dennis Gabor

Nobel Prize in Physics 1971 for his invention and development of the holographic method.