Watch: How to turn your smartphone into a 3D hologram

Holograms are awesome. They can make our heroes appear in 3D in front of us from thousands of kilometres away, whether it's Stephen Hawking appearing in Sydney earlier this year from the comfort of his home in London, or Tupac appearing at Coachella from, um, his elaborate hide-out in Cuba? We can even touch 3D holograms now, thanks to researchers in Japan who used powerful, ultra-quick lasers to produce tiny holograms that can be physically felt and respond to human touch. But what about playing around with holograms in the comfort of our own homes?

The awesome video above by Mrwhosetheboss on YouTube shows you how to create amazing 3D holograms that can be projected from your smartphone.

First off, you'll need to collect a few things:

Graph paper
CD case
Tape or superglue
Pen
Scissors
Smartphone
Knife or glass cutter

First you'll need to draw up a perfect rhombus shape on your graph paper. You can get the required dimensions from the video. Next, take off the sides of the CD case, place the rhombus template on top, and cut out the shape. Once you've got your first rhombus cut out, you can use this as a template to cut out three more.

Fasten the four plastic rhombus shapes together in an open vase shape using your tape - glue can work too, but the video recommends tape - and place it on your smartphone screen. To start projecting holograms, you'll need to load up hologram-specific videos from YouTube or on your browser, and Mrwhosetheboss links to a few of these on his YouTube page. Turn off the lights and you'll see a full, 360-degree animated visual. We can't wait to try it.

H/T: Digg