It is fair to say that reality has many problems. War. Famine. Illness. Taxes. Unwanted accumulation of pet hair. But if you look at the world through the eyes of some of the world’s biggest tech companies, a deeper, more fundamental problem is revealed: There just aren’t enough holograms.

From the early days of the modern technology revolution, the postwar rise of computers and connections that would eventually give us the Internet, email, iPhones, and Farm—technologists and science fiction writers have dreamed of a world with holograms: three-dimensional virtual objects and information floating in space around you, or entirely new spaces in the digital aether that you can explore and interact with.

This was a multidisciplinary head scratcher. It’s easy to…