Japanese engineers have unveiled a mind-boggling method to produce laser projections that hover in mid-air.

In a project dubbed ‘Fairy Lights in Femtoseconds’, the team used a femtosecond laser to heat molecules at a defined point in 3D space.

Excitingly, the projections are of a very high resolution – though limited to a small area – and can even be programmed to react and change when they come into contact with something solid.

The same feat has previously been achieved using nanosecond laser, but the images came with the unfortunate drawback of severely burring things that came into contact with them, like skin.

A femtosecond is one millionth of one billionth of a second, and using these minuscule pulses means the floating image can be touched without damaging the skin.

Currently, the femtosecond laser projections can only render images up to eight cubic millimetres in size, with resolutions reaching up to 200,000 voxels per second.

But, in a new research paper, the team explores methods and possibilities for scaling-up to create larger, high-definition holograms.

More details are available in the video below: