November 4, 2010
Kinect put a depth camera in millions of living rooms
Microsoft's 2010 launch release and later sensor documentation show a controller-free device that seeded volumetric research.
The archive
20 entries shown, each prepared after the events it records and published with its sources attached.
Zoom's immersive view composites faces onto one backdrop
Zoom's own documentation shows immersive view layers video tiles onto a backdrop, with no shared depth or parallax.
July 20, 2017
This headset display is the one that is actually holographic
A 2017 paper used phase-only holography for per-pixel focus and built-in vision correction in a headset.
Two flat drawings taught Wheatstone how depth is seen
Museum records of Wheatstone's mirror stereoscope and a secondary sketch of his life fix 1838 as the year binocular fusion was demonstrated as a display trick.
September 13, 2016
The Bank of England's polymer fiver added a hologram in 2016
The issuer's own pages date the £5 note's hologram patch and describe its tilt effect, without naming the diffractive technology used.
June 6, 2019
A dual backlight layer lets one screen switch out of 3D
Leia Inc's own patents describe a backlight toggling between diffuse 2D light and directional 3D beams.
March 1, 2016
Holoportation turned a body into a live 3D stream
A 2016 paper and Microsoft's ongoing project page describe real-time 3D capture for a HoloLens viewer, with one bandwidth caveat.
October 1, 1962
Off-axis beams turned Gabor's idea into viewable holograms
Two 1962 and 1964 JOSA papers show how an off-axis reference beam and diffuse laser light produced holograms of real three-dimensional objects.
May 1, 1990
MIT's 1989 Mark I display computed a moving hologram
A 1990 SPIE citation record and a later IEEE account describe Mark I, the MIT acousto-optic display behind the first computed moving hologram.
December 10, 2014
Google Cardboard turned any phone into a stereoscope
An open, unbranded viewer design used a phone's own screen and two lenses to reach a mass audience cheaply.
December 1, 2024
HoloLens stopped being made at the end of 2024
Microsoft's release notes record HoloLens 2 leaving production, with security updates promised only into 2028.
A 106-camera rig captures people as 3D mesh files
Microsoft's own documentation names the studio's camera count, output formats, and the studios it has licensed.
November 1, 2013
A lens array let a headset show where the eye should focus
A 2013 research prototype traded resolution for focus cues a stereoscopic headset cannot provide.
A quilt of rendered views feeds a lenticular light field
Looking Glass documentation specifies the view grid, ordering and shearing a lenticular display needs from rendered content.
August 8, 2023
Gaussian splatting rendered radiance fields in real time
The 2023 paper reached real-time frame rates by replacing a neural network with millions of renderable points.
February 8, 2011
A windshield display is a reflection trick, like Pepper's ghost
Supplier and patent documentation show the shared mechanism, without confirming production dates or eyebox figures.
March 2, 2021
Microsoft Mesh promised photoreal selves, shipped avatars
The 2021 Mesh announcement and today's Teams documentation show an avatar platform, distinct from telepresence proper.
May 18, 2021
Google's Starline paper describes a booth, not a headset
Google's publication page places the Starline peer-reviewed paper in December 2021, describing a tracked light-field booth, not a headset.
May 15, 2014
Rival firms sued over the patents behind a foil illusion
Court records show Hologram USA sued Pulse Evolution over foil-projection patents in 2014, settling by stipulated dismissal in 2016.
Gauze becomes a screen only when the light behind it changes
Manufacturer documentation for stage gauze and projection textiles shows lighting, not the fabric alone, decides what an audience sees.