Illuminating Images: Michael Bove holds a hologram of a teacup. Credit: Porter Gifford

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.

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