Holograms without the headset: glasses-free 3D at CES
Holograms without the headset. This is our home turf. FUNN prints holograms on coasters and you see them through a phone. The display industry wants to skip the phone entirely: a screen that is 3D to your naked eye. CES 2026 had more of those than ever. Most of them were small, a few were huge, and one of them is a windshield.
Looking Glass and the 86-inch wall
Looking Glass has been making glasses-free 3D displays for years. Its newer trick is what it calls a Hololuminescent Display: a fixed holographic volume layered on top of a regular high-resolution panel, so the thing can be thin and big. The 86-inch version is listed at 20,000 dollars, 4K, about two inches thick, and the company’s own pages have disagreed with each other on the ship date, with both May and September 2026 appearing. A display-industry veteran who walked the whole floor wrote that the Looking Glass demos beat every other spatial, 3D or light-field display he saw. One person’s opinion, but an informed one.
The hologram concierge
HumanBeam showed a life-size “holographic concierge” in a transparent box at the faytech booth: a 3D person who listens, talks back, gestures and points you to the restroom. The underlying trick is closer to a transparent display than a true hologram, but at a trade show the distinction is academic. People stopped. That is the whole point of a booth.
The hologram on your windshield
Hyundai Mobis won a CES 2026 Innovation Award for a holographic windshield display, a head-up display that uses holographic optics to put navigation and alerts across the glass. It is not a 3D movie screen, but it is the hologram most people will actually own first, because it will come with the car.
What was behind the curtain
A lot of the towering “hologram walls” at CES are still Pepper’s Ghost: a bright screen reflected in an angled sheet of glass, the same trick theaters used in the 1800s. It looks incredible from the front and like a pane of glass from the side. True light-field displays, the ones that let you look around the object, are still small and still expensive. Both facts were true in 2026 and both will be mostly true in 2027, but the gap closes a little every year.
Why a magazine cares
Our answer to the “glasses-free hologram” problem is the opposite of a 20,000-dollar wall: a two-dollar coaster and the phone already in your pocket. The 4D VIEWR app recognizes the print and anchors the hologram to it. The trade-off is that you look through a screen. Every year the display people get closer to a screen that is itself the hologram, and every year our print gets closer to being the trigger for it instead of the phone. Looking Glass panels can already play 3D content from a file; it is not a stretch to imagine a FUNN scene running on one in a store window.
What we are looking for in January
- Glasses-free 3D at a consumer price, meaning under 1,000 dollars, in a size you would put on a desk.
- Any display that takes a standard 3D format without a custom pipeline.
- Pepper’s Ghost booths that admit it. We will still film them, they are great.
- Holographic HUDs in cars you can actually buy in 2027.
Sources (checked October 2026): Looking Glass: HLD overview · OLED-Info: display impressions from CES 2026 · HumanBeam at CES 2026 · Groove Jones: CES 2026 trends · Digital Signage Today
