Hardlight Holograms

“	I am not sure Mira ever noticed what was wrong when she woke up. Until we told her that she had been sleeping on the branches of our holographic Christmas Tree over the night!	”
—Cathy in early 2020, telling a story about the Christmas Party some days ago

“	Emergency Medical Holographic Program AK-1 ready for duty... wait, what do you mean, you have still a problem with solid holograms? Wake me up when you got it running you fools!	”
—heard during the development of the first room sized Solid Hologram projector on Starbase 1

History

Holographic technology has always been a part of many Fenspace factions. Handwavium allowed the Fen to go from two-dimensional projection to free-floating three dimensional shapes within months, something that has angered the Daneverse entertainment industry a lot. Since the Professor gave Great Justice a robust and easy to reproduce holographic projector system during the Boskone War, the technology became ubiquitous in Fenspace.

But while three dimensional projections became cheap quickly, the results were still without substance, free floating images that could be seen, but not touched. Several factions and research institutions worked on solving this problem without success for years. There were some examples of solid hologram techs since the early 2014s, but they stayed one-of-a-kind items, because their creators were unwilling or unable to reproduce the technology. But then, a blue-hair moment pushed the technology of Fenspace a little bit forward.

During a Christmas party in 2019 at Jenga with lots of partying, a group of catgirls and the Holo artist Dakota suddenly began to rip apart the UFP built projectors of the holographic Christmas tree and began to work on it. Like most blue-hair moments, it couldn’t be reconstructed later what had happened during the night, but the holo-projectors had gained a new quality during the night, the projection had become solid.

Unfortunately, nobody had a clue how the system did achieve this effect.

Looking forward to work on this technical challenge, Catgirl Industries invited a research team of Federation hologram specialists to work with them solving the puzzle. It took the joined research team of Trekkies and catgirls (with regular help and advice from Dakota) more than a year to replicate the effect with a new prototype, but in the early 2020 they finally did it.

Since then, solid hologram technology sold by both Trekkies, Catgirl Industries and Dakota became more and more widespread in Fenspace.

The technology

Hardlight system (or Solid Holograms as the Trekkies call them usually) are a more complex kind of projection system that can give their output a solid surface. Depending on the complexity of the projection system this ability can be anywhere between the projection of smooth walls and a Star Trek style holodeck.

Most Hardlight projectors are very limited in the amount of force they can apply on real objects within their area of effect. You can easily touch Hardlight projections, but pressing too hard will let you slide through the projections. Most times this disrupts the effect of a solid surface for all projections close-by.

Quirks

• A lot of Hardlight holodeck systems have issues with their safety protocols.

Trivia

• It took the Trekkies several years to finish the first Holodeck
• Catgirl Industries still use the original Hardlight system at Jenga for their Christmas parties