Who can forget that opening scene in Star Wars, when Princess Leia appears in her holographic glory? Wow, we said. Holy crap. This is awesome.

Of course, that was 30 years ago, and we were in grade school.

Flash forward to present day. Holograms don't seem that cool anymore, do they? In fact, when CNN used them during the 2008 election, "awesome" would be the last word we use to describe them. "Creepy" is more likely.

In fact, if you look up holograms on that bastion of knowledge, Wikipedia, you'd find that the top uses are data storage (expensive) and security (those little thingies inside some foreign currency). And after that? Art. Yeah, not exactly what we envisioned 30 years ago.

(We totally expect a flood of emails on how we're oversimplifying things and that holograms have many important uses, such as ____, ____, and ____. Anyway...)

And we're not sure what the inventor of holograms, Hungarian Jew Dennis Gabor, Nobel Prize laureate, envisioned for his brainchild.

But at least he gave us Princess Leia.