Holo Kitty

My latest project is a holographic cat you can pet.

🐈!

The hologram viewer is made of acrylic, and hot glued together. It was a lot of fun to make. Here is my neighbor Yoav cutting the acrylic with a power saw:

And my mom and I stenciling the acrylic sheets:

The holographic cat is a program I wrote in Processing that uses the front-facing camera to detect motion and animate the cat accordingly.

// if no motion is detected, let the cat sleep
if (!motionDetector.checkHit(0, 0, width, height)) {
    // show the first 10 frames of the animation where the cat is sleeping
    image(cat[catIndex], 75, 50);
    if (catIndex < 10) {
      catIndex++;
    } else {
      catIndex = 0;
    }
  } else {
    // if motion is detected, show the rest of the frames animating the cat, 
    // and play the meowing sound file                  
    image(cat[catIndex], 75, 50);
    if (catIndex == 32) {
      meow.play();
      meow = minim.loadFile("meow.wav");
    }
    if (catIndex < cat.length - 1) {
      catIndex++;
    } else {
      catIndex = 12;
    }
  }

Source code for the cat here: https://github.com/danigrant/hologramcat/

I think there’s a lot more that can be done here. It would be really cool to have holographic Alexa, or to be able to FaceTime my parents and appear as a hologram on their desk. Plus we are starting to live in a world where fictional characters are more and more integrated into our daily lives rather than stuck inside of a book or a movie, and I think holograms could be a big part of that one day.