With the advancement of holographic technique, it has now become possible to control the reconstruction of a hologram's object wave in a common desktop-window environments. The holographic emulsion is transparent if it is not illuminated when mounted in front of a screen. In this case, an interaction with software applications on the desktop is possible in a familiar way and the entire screen content is visible.

The holographic content whether visible or not is always located at a fixed spatial position within the desktop. An application that renders the graphical content can run in a 'Windows' mode, thereby covering an arbitrary area on the desktop behind the emulsion. If the position and the dimensions of the graphics window are known, the projector-based illumination binds the reference wave to the emulsion portion that is located directly on top of the underlying window. Thereby, all the techniques are limited to the window's boundaries. The remaining portion of the desktop is not affected by the illumination-the holographic content or graphical content. The graphical content can also remain registered with the holographic content. This effective technique leads to a seamless integration of holograms into common desktop environments. We can temporarily minimize the "holographic window" or align over the main focus while working other applications.

The figure shows a holographic window on a desktop together with other applications. It shows an optical white-light reflection hologram of a dinosaur skull with combined graphical 3D soft tissues. Top