Build Your Own “Holographic” Display on a Tiny Budget

The term holographic is pretty ambiguous and by some definitions, holographic displays aren’t even possible. But modern volumetric displays sure tick a lot of the right boxes. The problem? They’re very expensive. So, if you’re on a tight budget, you can instead follow Yakroo’s Instructables tutorial to build this “holographic” display for about $30.

This display is completely two-dimensional and it isn’t actually holographic by any definition, but it has that sci-fi look to it and is therefore still very cool. It puts glowing blue graphics on a transparent pane of glass, resulting in Minority Report vibes that look futuristic even today. As configured, it functions as a clock with a fun animated robot on the screen and useful status messages from the host PC. But you can use the same hardware to display whatever you like.

The key component is a transparent OLED screen. For most applications, transparency in a display would be a bad thing and so OLED screens are manufactured with opaque back panels. But because they look so neat, some manufacturers have started churning out screens without the back panels and you can see right through them.

Yakroo simply put a transparent OLED screen on a 3D-printed base. Yakroo says they used a Raspberry Pi Pico 2 for control, but it actually appears to be a TinyTronics RP2350 SuperMini development board (which has the same RP2350 microcontroller as the Pico 2). Other components include a lithium battery with TP4056 charging module, a 5V boost converter, and a rotary encoder.

The result is a “holographic” display that looks awesome, but is quite affordable.