Most of us are accustomed seeing holograms in our daily lives as pictures on stickers that are usually used to authenticate a product. Other uses of holograms are also in many security applications that are both electronic and conventional.
The basic concept of a hologram is that through the splitting of a laser beam, an object is recorded optically and reconstructed on a plane to appear as if the picture is three dimensional. There are many postcards that give a very nice feel of 3D movement as the picture changes according to the point of view.
Holography has been around for decades and everyone was familiar with it by the late 70s, but another concept of holography that was actually spawned from the original concept, still has scientists flexing their mental muscles to bring to reality. This is the concept of actual 3D holograms that are not drawn on paper, but in air, made to appear like a real 3D object. This concept has been used repeatedly in hundreds of movies. But apart from the mere recreational satisfaction, there are practical uses of the concept as well, like the storage of digital information in a 3D hologram that could be exponentially larger in volume than the present storage capacities. 3D holograms could also help surgeons to perform complex surgeries from thousands of miles away, and engineers could have a detailed 3D blueprint of a building from anywhere if they want to speed up the process of construction.