Imagine making structure plans for a building or a house, even creating designer clothes, the Tony Stark way. This means goodbye pen and paper, and hello 3D hologram.

This trick can be seen in movies like "Star Wars" and "Iron Man," but 3D hologram is quite a handful in the real world. At this point, Microsoft Hololens (where glasses are still needed to get a glimpse of the 3D image) is the closest thing mankind has, according to Singularity Hub.

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Wouldn't it be cool if images can be projected mid-air for real not just in movies?

Digital Nature Group may have just found a way to do that. Popular Science learned that they used lasers, mirrors and cameras to create voxels, small points of light that can create a three-dimensional, interactive hologram that can respond to human touch.

To make a safe-to-touch holograms, the team used femtosecond lasers. As the laser focuses its energy ionizing the air, voxels — light-emitted plasma — are created.

The resolution of the three-dimensional image can go as high as 200,000 dots per second, Tech Gen Mag reported. Yoichi Ochiai, the principal investigator, said that the hologram felt like sand paper, but, for some, it felt like static electricity.

The key breakthrough in making these holograms safe to touch is by firing the laser at a shorter duration. Researchers discovered that firing the laser more than a two-second burst will burn the skin.

The femtosecond laser passed through a spatial light modulator, a mirror and a Galvano scanner, which positions a mirror to direct the beams. There's a camera below the hologram capturing this interaction, allowing the dots to react to touch.

University of Rochester Professor Chunlei Go said that there were earlier studies similar to this. They have also used nanosecond and femtosecond lasers in creating images but they haven't reached resolution this high without burning the human skin.

This may still be in the research phase, but this will help in designing femtosecond laser displays in the future. Ochiai's team is now set to work and make the hologram larger.

Watch this fairy lights in femtosecond video.

TagsLaer, Science, 3D, Hologram