Fairy Lights in Femtoseconds: Tangible Holographic Plasma (SIGGRAPH)

This page has been around for a while. If you watch the YouTube video, you can see the skin on the person’s finger get burnt as they touch the little tiny plasma balls. ▶ this video

Like these but less plasma? ▶ this video My favorite part of this is looking at all the toasted skin on the fingertips in the video.

Using the term thin air is misleading IMO. I saw a slightly different version of this a few years ago [1]. It basically used pulsed laser to create plasma at certain x,y,z without any additional reflective medium added to the environment. However it's crazy loud [2]. From the Nature paper [3] it seems to work on similar principles with the drawback that you need "light scattering (or absorbing and generating) surfaces" instead of free air. In other words you still need some medium for projection/reflection, like a smoke cloud for example: "it is unlikely that the display would function outdoors without an enclosure unless particles were much more strongly confined or steps were taken to refresh trapped particles regularly" [1] ▶ this video [2] link [3] link

An example of "tangible interaction" is pressing this checkbox in this video: ▶ this video In terms of what the projection feels like, this article explains that to some people the laser feels like sandpaper, and to some people it feels like a static shock: link

Here's the YouTube link with the demo: ▶ this video Someday we may have the displays we see in the movies at this rate.