The Media Lab at MIT has achieved an impressive feat by creating real 3D holograms and transmitting a reenactment of the Princess Leia scene from the originals Star Wars. The group of researchers led by Michael Bove has achieved real-time 3D holography which hacking Kinect and using it as an input device. The best part here is you can view this sans any glasses and also you can move around and see behind objects in the scene.

At the first instance, the idea comes across as extremely simple but the challenge lies in its implementation. It’s the display here that helps in achieving the feat by creating the interference patterns by computing them and then displaying them on a screen. The display is used by the MIT folks was developed by students of Stephen Benton, a pioneer of holographic imaging who died in 2003. It is, in many ways, the most vital part of the system here and the team is working on creating better and cheaper versions of the same.
The Kinect here functions as a cheap, off-the-shelf camera for it comes for just $150. The camera calculates the location of each pixel in 3D which is used by the computer to create the hologram in real time. The data is sent over to a laptop which then passes it on to a PC with three GPU based graphics cards. Then comes the last segment where the PC computes the interference patterns needed to create the wavefront.

[Popsci]