Hologram installations in water and fog

What is a hologram installation?

A hologram installation puts a moving, three-dimensional image into the air instead of onto a wall. Projectors send light into water screens and fog. Water and fog are almost invisible until the light hits them, and then forms appear to hang in mid-air, in front of visitors, above them and around them.

That is how it reads on site: a 3D hologram you can walk into, with no LED screen in sight.

Our holographic installations have been shown at festivals, city light festivals, exhibitions and public events in Germany, Portugal, Hungary, Russia, Japan, the United Arab Emirates and India. We also make hologram pieces for trade-fair stands and stages. Concept, content, technology and show operation come from one team in Berlin and Tbilisi.

Water screen projection and fog projection

Three formats of hologram projection, for indoor and outdoor sites:

• Water screen and fog layers: a water screen carries the front of the image and fog stands further back, so several image-carrying layers of water and fog sit at different depths. This is the volumetric lightfield method behind Depth/100 and BEYOND. In Stefan Ihmig's account, BEYOND's large outdoor configurations extend the light about 100 metres into the space, depending on the site and the weather.
• Walk-in fog: beams and light-forms drawn through fog, with spatial sound. Visitors walk into the image, touch it and photograph it from inside. ÆTHER works this way in the open air, and BEYOND has also been shown indoors at MaHalla, Berlin, as a walk-through of light in fog.
• Fog and architecture: projection mapping on a building, with fog carrying the image off the surface into the air in front of and around it. Examples are Tessellation on a silo in Bengaluru and Infinity Gate on a façade in Weimar in 2019.

Outdoors: wind and weather

Most of the works on this page were made for open-air sites: a lakeside at Boom Festival, the festival grounds at O.Z.O.R.A., the Marx-Engels-Forum in Berlin and the silo of a former glass factory in Bengaluru. All of them were shown after dark.

Water and fog behave differently in wind. In Stefan Ihmig's experience, fog installations keep working in winds up to about 40–50 km/h; a water screen, depending on the set-up, is usually fine up to about 25–30 km/h, deforms above that, and is usually no longer practical above about 35–40 km/h.

Tell us about the site early, so wind and weather are part of the plan from the first conversation.

How a hologram project runs

Four steps from the brief to the last show night.

1. 01

   Brief & site survey

   we start with your goals, the site and the audience. Photos, plans and a site visit tell us what the place can do, and what technology it needs.

2. 02

   Concept & previsualisation

   storyline, visual language and a previsualisation of the piece, so you see the idea before production starts.

3. 03

   Production

   3D content, sound design and, where needed, the physical structure, produced in-house or with our long-standing partners.

4. 04

   On-site realisation

   projectors, water, fog, calibration and show control. We run the hologram show, from rehearsals to the last night.