In a dark room down the hall from Michael Bove's office at MIT's Media Lab is an apparatus with a white screen the size of a CD jewel box. When Bove sits in a chair opposite the machine and flips a switch, an image of a human rib cage seems to leap out a few inches beyond the screen. The image is produced by the Mark II, a 14-year-old holographic-video system that takes up most of the room. But its vividness is one of the inspirations for Bove's own project: to bring 3-D video displays to consumer and medical markets.

Bove's new system, which is called Mark III, is scheduled to be completed by the end of the summer. It can run on a standard PC with a graphics card and will be small enough to fit on top of a desk. (In contrast, an earlier version of Mark II required whole racks of computers.) Although Bove doesn't yet have any manufacturing partners, he predicts that a product based on Mark III's design would cost just a couple of hundred dollars to manufacture and could become standard in doctor's offices as a way to view magnetic reso­nance images and computed tomography scans in 3-D detail. It would also be within the price range of gamers and technology enthusiasts.