VR engineers create Iron Man-style hologram app & it looks incredible

The concept of interactive holograms has long been a staple of science fiction stories, but a team of Meta engineers has brought the concept closer to reality with a new demonstration.

Do you remember that bit in the first Iron Man movie, when Tony Stark is working on his suit and uses a hologram to create an exploded view, then just picks up and throws away any bits he doesn’t want to keep? Well, a team of VR engineers at Meta has created an app that does the same thing.

The team created a VR app called CADDY for the Meta Quest to try to make modern tech catch up with what is depicted in movies. The demo shows a room inside VR with a floating Meta Quest 3 headset. The user demonstrating the app makes a simple two-handed gesture and the headset pulls apart into an exploded view, with every individual component on display.

A tool for learning and training

The user then starts picking up individual components of the headset, moving them around, and making them bigger so all the details of the screw holes, clips, and electronics are visible. Then, with another gesture, the headset magically reassembles itself, the components that had been moved around twisting and turning in the air to realign for assembly.

The video was shared on Twitter/X and Reddit, where replies commented on how cool the demo was. Others mentioned that an app of this type could be invaluable for teaching and training. Twitter user Jordan Rothstein said: “This is a super exciting app! applications like this are going to revolutionize learning. Using this in a mechanical engineering class would be awesome to truly understand different machinery. Imagine if you need to replace a part in your vehicle, you could practice first.”

VR and AR have already seen wide use in training applications, and apps such as CADDY could carry the concept even further.