At this zoo, you can dodge charging elephants, peek into a hippo’s mouth, and give friendly giraffes a pat. These exciting adventures are all part of Australia’s Hologram Zoo, which just opened this year. The zoo boasts 50 incredibly realistic holographic displays, ranging from dinosaurs to gorillas, all created using laser technology.
The person who made it claims it’s the most futuristic animal park on the planet, using technology that has never been seen before anywhere.
Bruce Dell, the chief executive of Axiom Holographics and creator of Hologram Zoo, told BBC that when the 30-meter whale swims by, everyone becomes silent as if they are in awe and respect for such an amazing creature. There’s plenty of laughter and screams otherwise! It’s all digital magic, fooling your brain into seeing stuff that ain’t even real.
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Touching the unseen: the power of depth technology
Bruce Dell explained how they make it seem like there’s something real in the air by using laser light to project objects, giving the impression that they can be viewed from various angles as you move around.
“The animals come into the room, they walk through the tunnel, and you pat them just like in the movies. You’re seeing an animal made of light in front of you. You’ll go out and reach out your hand and pat a lion.”
The hologram show uses this fresh “depth” tech that makes the animals look massive. They use a laser projector with crystals that let the regular sunglasses worn by the crowd divide the light fields, bringing the moving images to life.
Most importantly, there’s this gadget that can tell where everyone is in the room, giving them a personalized virtual adventure. The hologram shows even have this sensory thing going on, letting people smell the flowers and trees.
The cool tech lighting up Axiom’s park in the Brisbane suburbs is making waves in other places too. Bruce Dell spilled to the BBC that his company scored deals with big shots like Airbus and Honeywell, and they even built a fancy hologram aquarium for a swanky Bill Gates-owned hotel in the Maldives.
Bringing sci-fi to life: The challenge of affordable holograms
The Hologram Zoo boss is all about shaking up the game, slashing expenses, and boosting the good stuff, crafting parts in a special factory down in Queensland, Australia.
According to Bruce Dell, everyone’s been waiting for the hologram revolution. It’s like something straight out of sci-fi, and we were supposed to have it already. But the problem has always been the crazy high costs. He reckons there’s some serious work to be done to make them way more affordable.
“Everyone is expecting the hologram revolution. It is something we see in science fiction and we should have had it by now. But holograms have always been so expensive. We felt there were some things to do there to make them a lot cheaper.”
Over in Canberra, the hustle to reinvent holography is going full steam ahead. The brains at the Australian National University (ANU) are claiming they’re messing with old-school laws of physics that rely on lenses and mirrors to scatter light.
The ANU crew is playing around with meta-optics or nano-photonics. They’re checking out what happens when light beams hit these itty-bitty meta surfaces, which are like tiny, tiny things. Apparently, they can control the waves, kinda like a regular lens, but way smaller.
“We are trying to push into the future of these technologies. When we are able to miniaturize these lasers to put them on a small portable device is when we will make the leap,” Prof Dragomir Neshev from the ANU’s Research School of Physics told BBC. “At the moment, everything is based on where the holograms were at the very start in the ’60s and ’70s.”
Meta-Surfaces: revolutionizing everyday gadgets
These meta-surfaces might make regular reading glasses into night-vision goggles, swap out the need for blood tests with simple breath checks, and even let us know when the stuff in the fridge has gone bad.
According to Prof Neshev, using holographic tricks could be a game-changer for medicine. It might just assist surgeons in navigating through a patient’s insides right down to the cells, all with live images.
Even in the world of psychology and theatre, hologram tricks are making waves. The Queensland University of Technology (QUT) has cooked up what they’re calling a “world-first collaboration.” They’ve got this hour-long play called Alex, all about a kid searching for her missing dad and figuring out herself along the way.
The play carries a powerful message about mental health. The folks behind the show are pitching it as an “artsy treatment” for folks struggling with eating disorders.
“Alex looks very much like a traditional play, any other trip to the theatre until the holographic image appears. It looks more like the film Roger Rabbit; real actors and animations inhabiting the same theatrical space,” Dr. Shane Pike, the play’s author from QUT’s School of Creative Practice told BBC.
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Transforming invisible material into solid characters
While holograms make a whole virtual universe, QUT’s augmented reality uses a cool effects screen, the Hologauze, to bring the play’s virtual folks onto the stage.
Dr. Pike explained that they use a special material that seems invisible, but when they shine an image on it from their powerful projectors, it turns into a solid character. They link the animations to a live actor backstage through motion-capture technology.
The Aussie researchers are aiming to make super realistic moving holograms that you can just watch straight from your phone screen.
Lately, Bruce Dell put together a hologram dinosaur spectacle at the Australian Museum in Sydney. He envisions a hologram-filled future, with floating burgers and pizzas at fast-food joints and flashy 3D jewels enticing buyers at jewelry stores.
According to Dr. Pike, we often talk about revolutions in technology, like television, cars, mobile phones, and light bulbs, and we wonder what’s coming next. Well, the buzz in the media and science fiction has been saying for a while that the next big thing is the hologram revolution, with holographic stuff all around us.
