I went to that one with my family. The GM pavilion was the most memorable, with future cars and a holographic projection show.

I was thinking it must only work in one direction, but you have a point, it seems to work best from only one single point. I wonder if it could be designed to work from any viewpoint. Somebody get Watson working on it....he might have to design holographic tile printing first.
Still a *quality idea.

As Eric says, not a hologram. It's just a different way to project an image.

Not even new, though this is a step further than I'd recently seen. They've had those "holographic" clocks that work on the same principle for decades, and for the past few years, bicycle spoke lights that will project images.

Somebody get that technology some acetaminophen because that's pretty sick.

I wondered how we were supposed to achieve the holographic building-sized billboards from such dystopian futures as presented in Blade Runner and Ghost in the Shell, and this is an interesting start!

*promote

I still think saying something like "the beginning of everything" is a little presumptuous for us recently technological monkeys to say. I feel like there is an awful amount of knowledge that we don't know or understand, yet. I love thinking about it though - kinda like that Sun Ra song - "There are other worlds (they have not told you of)" A Big Bang might just be a small aspect, that happens all the time all over a vast multiverse, outside multiverses, inside multiverses, folded into trillions of dimensions that exist as free flowing holographic data, that really just exists inside a super-technological golden egg, on the table of a very wise alien and your life was just you dreaming and then you wake up as the wise alien and you say "How the hell did I forget about this strange ass egg?!"

Yeah, no, a CG whale comped into a shot of a non-responding audience isn't a hologram. The video linked in Gratefulmom's comment is just AR, not a hologram - they're looking at themselves in a video monitor that's got CG animals overlaid on the feed. And the Vancouver Expo video is probably an example of the Pepper's ghost illusion, like the recent "hologram" of 2Pac, rather than actually holographic.

And good call on the "Project Blue Beam" bullshit.

I think like the first comment there said, they're more like projections and overlays, not holograms.
My guess is that most of what we see is either added on top of the live video of the people, not actually projected amongst them, and the other one (in the dark) is like a planetarium movie, 360 surround, maybe even 3D, not hologram.

Now THIS was holographic, and awesome (I saw it in person), and it's a terrible shame that now, 30 years later, we still don't seem to have this technology outside of concerts.....(sorry for the quality of the video)
*related=http://videosift.com/video/Vancouver-Expo-86-Part-III-GM-Holographic-Exhibit

Vancouver - Expo 86 - Part III- GM Holographic Exhibit has been added as a related post - related requested by newtboy.

Sadly I'm going to have to call 'fake'.

First, "project blue beam" is a conspiracy theory idea that claims things like the planes that flew into the twin towers were really holograms, or that there's an alien invasion program creating odd holographic images to confuse humans, or aliens are using holograms to present us with a false messiah/Jesus/Gawd/4 horsemen of the apocalypse. Uh...yeah.
Second, I notice that only a single person in the background audience has a reaction that might be attributed to seeing a whale jump at you, the rest just clap casually.
Third, there are many clear artifacts at the whale's edge where they photoshopped it in.

I wish holograms were at this level today, and they should be, but they aren't. Projecting white into a bright 3D space doesn't work without smoke or mist to project on, and even then it's only really visible when the surroundings are darker.

I went with mom, dad, and my grandmother. We flew to Washington and drove from there.
It was a neat trip, but I expected more from the expo. With a few exceptions, it seemed like it was done on the cheap, compared to what I had seen in old footage. I expected to ride in a hover car, watch hologram movies, ride moving sidewalks, ride monorails, see some early teleportation, etc. Of those, I got a holographic movie, so I was somewhat disappointed. What do you expect from a 16 year old though?

Posted the other 2 videos in the comments of that one. Feel free to sift them if you wish, I won't be posting them for real.

Oh yeah...sorry.
http://videosift.com/video/Vancouver-Expo-86-Part-III-GM-Holographic-Exhibit

You've reminded me of something hilarious from the expo, but I can't find a picture of it. There was a 2D sculpture of a Canadian Mountie, I think near the roller coaster, that totally had a huge boner! It was really the end of the arm, but the way it was made the elbow is in back, but in front was just a little triangle just below waist level. It was too funny, and obviously not intentional. Oh, the things you notice when you're 16.

The GM pavilion was by far the most interesting thing at the fair that year...at least to a 16 year old kid (and I'm including the roller coaster). Sadly the footage isn't the best, but the quality of the projection was excellent. The show was an old native American telling stories that came to life in his campfire smoke. It wasn't until the end that he becomes smoke and you realize he wasn't an actor, but was also a projection the entire time. It was amazing, and more than a bit sad that we don't have holographic movies today, seeing as it was clearly possible 30 years ago.
I don't remember much of the rest of the fair. Lots of silly movies and miniatures, a few performances, a couple of rides, and lots of oddly depressing foods. GM definitely won my vote for best exhibit by far.

Hey! I went there. Did you check out the GM pavilion with the hologram? How cool was that, and why don't we have holographic movies now?

Your video, Holorama - Holographic Cinema, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

I'll keep this fairly brief for once but, why is everyone so hung up on the idea that the theoretical "simulation" is somehow distinct from "reality"?

To put it another way, what are the laws of physics themselves?

We do appear to inhabit a reality defined by laws we can describe mathematically. The mathematical models may be abstracted, but whatever they describe is presumably in some sense analogous in its "true" nature right? (even if we can't get at it directly)

If you take the leap into thinking that reality may be more mathematical than physical in nature (or rather that "physical" is a property of what we could think of as mathematical phenomena interacting in the right way), then questions about who's computer were in kind of become moot.

If reality itself is fundamentally mathematical in nature, we don't need a computer in which to run it, so much as reality itself is the computer.

I really don't think it's an either or thing, more like a shift in how we think about the concept of "reality" itself. Even if an experiment could prove that the universe is holographic in nature, it needn't change anything about it's validity as a "real" thing.

The "simulation" and "reality" needn't be mutually exclusive, merely different ways of understanding the same phenomenon i.e. that we exist and experience things.