Making Holograms at Home!
- Dr. Shereen Hamdy
- Jul 21
- 3 min read
We’re all familiar with the idea of holograms from sci-fi movies and TV shows. You might remember the hologram of Princess Leia in the original Star Wars, or the frequent use of holograms in Star Trek episodes and Marvel movies. This post will walk you through how to make your own holograms — of a sort — at home using basic materials!
How can basic materials make a hologram? It's important to qualify that we are focusing here on hologram-like effects made using the Pepper's Ghost illusion. A true hologram is a three-dimensional image that is (1) formed by using laser light and a recording medium to record the exact pattern that light makes when it reflects off of an object and then (2) recovered usually by using laser light with the recording to recreate that light pattern.¹ While making a true hologram usually takes equipment only found in research laboratories, the hologram-like illusion known as the Pepper’s Ghost illusion can be easily made at home!
The Pepper’s Ghost illusion was first popularized in the 1860s by theater productions that used the effect to portray real-looking ghosts onstage. Productions would use a large pane of glass carefully placed and angled in front of the stage to reflect a view of an offstage actor towards the audience. If the offstage actor was lit brightly enough and the background behind them was dark enough, their reflection would appear to the audience as if the actor was really standing, or floating, on stage. Today, it is occasionally used with a large display to create the illusion of a live show by a performer who has passed away, for example the “performance” using recordings of Michael Jackson for the 2014 Billboard Music Awards.²
While the Pepper’s Ghost illusion is not a true hologram, you can recreate it at home or in your classroom using transparency paper! This can be bought online or at most office supply stores. To make your own Pepper’s Ghost holograms at home, you will also need scissors, scotch tape, and a marker. Last, you will need to print out this shape (don't worry, theres a downloadable PDF linked below!):
This shape should be scaled to be about five inches wide for a phone or about eight inches wide for a tablet. If you want to save transparency paper, the phone-size shape can be traced onto half of a sheet.
To make your hologram projector:
Place a sheet of transparency paper on top of the printout.
Trace the shape (both solid and dotted lines) onto the transparency paper with the marker.
Cut out the shape along the solid lines.
Make sharp creases along the dotted lines so that the shape folds into something resembling a four-sided pyramid.
To complete your hologram projector, tape it so it can hold its shape.
Last, play this video (it is sometimes easier to use this convenient shortened URL: tinyurl.com/omni-holo), or another that is arranged like it, on a phone in full screen mode and place your pyramid projector narrow side down on the phone screen. As with the example of the theater production, you can achieve a more dramatic result if you move to a dark room and/or set your phone’s screen to maximum brightness. The image from the video should appear to float inside your hologram projector!
How does it work?
The Pepper’s Ghost illusion works because of the way we perceive reflections as seemingly located inside of a reflecting surface, for example inside of a mirror. When our eyes see light coming from a certain direction, our brain straightforwardly interprets this light as an object located in that direction, even if we know the reality is more complicated. This is how, in the example of the theater production, an actor reflected to the audience from offstage by a pane of glass in front of the stage will appear to be in a location behind that glass onstage. In the case of the at-home hologram projector, light from the image on your phone’s or tablet’s screen is reflected outwards by the transparency paper, and so the image on the screen appears to be behind the transparency paper — in the center of the inverted-pyramid-shaped hologram projector.
The Pepper’s Ghost hologram projector is a fun and accessible project that also introduces ideas such as the reflection of light, vision and focus, and virtual images. We encourage you to share this activity with young learners in your life!
Hologram Resources
Click below for a free PDF containing an instructor guide and a single-page student instruction sheet for this project:
Looking for more on how holograms show up in pop culture? Check out this video on how holograms were used as a special effect in the Marvel movie Black Panther.
Works Cited:
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