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Japanese researchers created holograms you can touch

Hologram
University of Tsukuba

Japanese researchers have created holograms that can be disrupted by human touch.

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The touchable holograms, called Fairy Lights, could serve as the beginning to developing technology where humans could interact with the hologram.

This could particularly come in handy in medicine, where hologram technology is used to demonstrate certain procedures.

The holograms were made using femtosecond lasers, a laser that can excite physical matter to emit light in 3D form, the researchers explained in a paper. The lasers can produce high-frequency pulses, from 1,000 to 200,000 pulses per second depending on the type of laser.

The pulses respond to human touch, allowing humans to disrupt them while they're in the air, Reuters explained.

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hologram beam
Yoichi Ochiai/University of Tsukuba

"People's daily lives would change if we use a bigger laser in a bigger space where people can interact with it, and to see how it can be used in situations where three dimensional communication is necessary such as a construction site or in the medical field," Yoichi Ochiai, one of the lead researchers on the project from Tsukuba University, told Reuters.

Previous technology used to create touchable holograms have burned skin.

"If we can project an image in a three dimensional form, and if you can touch it, then you can make something where you'll think that there actually is something there," Ochiai told Reuters.

Watch the touchable holograms in action:

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