A real step towards the virtual holodeck

The Holodeck was a major feature of many episodes of Star Trek: the Next Generation. The 23^rd century Starship Enterprise (NCC 1701D to its fans) had an entertainment feature that allowed its crew to enter fully convincing three dimensional virtual reality scenarios, acting out fantasy scenarios in such locations as 1930s gangster movie Chicago and Sherlock Holmes’s Victorian London. But in the real world, holographic projection has never been possible. Researchers from Bilkent University in Ankara now claim to have made the advance which puts a simple version of the holodeck, at least, within reach.

Creating a three-dimensional holographic projection relies on back-to-back stacking of a large number of two-dimensional images. However, the images tend to interfere with each other, making the projection fuzzy, a phenomenon known as cross-talk.

While previous attempts to solve this problem have concentrated on optical technology, the co-leader of the Ankara project, Prof Ömer Ilday, believes this is not the best approach. “The reason of this cross-talk is the mathematics, not shortcomings of the physical components,” he said. “Any pair of high-dimensional mutually random vectors tend to be orthogonal. This basic result is a consequence of the Central Limit Theorem and the Law of Large Numbers. We use this property, together with a neat, but straightforward wavefront engineering trick to add random phase to each image, to eliminate cross-talk without using any additional optics.”