Trope-a-Day: Hologram Projection Imperfection

Hologram Projection Imperfection: As mentioned under the Hologram trope, their glamor failure is deliberate; trigraphic projections are splendidly perfect and accurate, and even can dynamically correct for lighting differences when used sender to receiver – so, unless otherwise called for, they’re deliberately tuned to slight transparency to clue people in that they aren’t solid objects.

Trope-a-Day: Projected Man

Projected Man: A common representation-format for artificial intelligences (and other infomorphs) – although a majority of AIs do not use biosapience-shaped avatars, preferring more abstract neomorphic shapes – and telerepresentation users both.  In some cases, may not be a simple trigraphic (hologram, to speakers of non-deeply-SFnal English who don’t realize the difference), but a reality graphic, projected non-matter with actual physical presence (see: Hard Light), referred to as an aquastor.

Trope-a-Day: Hologram

Hologram: This future does have these (and uses them an awful lot for user interfaces, it must be said, since dynamically reconfigurable interfaces are (a) shiny, and (b) easy to implement this way); however, as the trope points out, there are properly not “holograms”, but really “volumetric displays”, even though the former is easier to say.  Which is why the future calls them “trigraphics”.

On the trait list: not opaque, do require an emitter and indeed line-of-sight to it (which means, yes, stick your hand into it and it will clip; mitigated in some circumstances by using lots of emitters at different positions/angles; also, things like trivision viewers and hololiths solve the problem by projecting the trigraphic inside a transparent solid block), have deliberate glamor failure to ensure no-one confuses them for real objects, and do need a camera to see things.