“Help me Obi-Wan Kenobi, you’re my only hope.”

Save for lightsabers, traveling at the speed of light and jittery robot sidekicks, perhaps the most memorable technology in the original Star Wars movie was the three-dimensional hologram of Princess Leia. Scientists have been trying to turn this fiction into a reality for years, with varying degrees of success. But new research into laser projection might finally lead to holograms we can touch.

The research team, comprising scientists from universities across Japan, has managed to create a display out of femtosecond lasers, which they’re calling “Fairy Lights.” These lasers pulse at one quadrillionth of a second and turn air in a specific point into plasma—or ionized air—which you can touch. Research lead Yoichi Ochiai told Popular Science that the plasma feels like sandpaper.

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The team’s research shows that all sorts of science-fiction displays may be possible in the future. We could have holograms that wrap around real-world objects, or body parts, or computers interfaces that float in midair. The lasers pulse so quickly that disrupting the displays with our fingers could be fed back into a computer in what would appear to our eyes as real time, like moving a mouse and seeing a cursor move on a screen. Tony Stark would certainly be pleased.

There have been previous attempts to turn lasers into holograms, and while there has been some successes, this femtosecond laser has one key advantage: it wouldn’t sear your skin if you touch it. The Fairy Lights team pulses its laser at a faster rate—meaning less laser radiation exposure for your skin—that creates a perfectly safe hologram. The problem now is that the holograms that the team has has managed to create are tiny—not much larger than the size of a pinhead.

Spectrum IEEE reports that it’s theoretically possible for these displays to scale up, meaning our future displays may soon look like those a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.

Immersive, highly visual, 3D environments are now on the horizon after British scientists managed to recreate mid-air sensory experiences by controlling sound waves to project 3-D haptic holograms that can be seen and felt.

A team from the University of Bristol’s Interaction and Graphics research group, using the UltraHaptics, a system for creating haptic feedback in mid-air, were successful in testing several shapes, including spheres and pyramids.

“Touchable holograms, immersive virtual reality that you can feel and complex touchable controls in free space are all possible ways of using this system,” Dr Ben Long, Research Assistant from the Bristol Interaction and Graphics (BIG) group in the Department of Computer Science, said.

In a short time span the researchers managed to leap from simple 2- D outline in mid-air to full shapes, by introducing a LeapMotion which tracks the position of a user’s hands. Then the waves are calibrated to produce projection which, to human touch, feels like different objects of varying shapes. Users can feel 3-D projected objects, get feedback for mid-air gestures and interact with virtual shapes.

Researchers rely on pressure difference created by the machine using ultrasound waves displaced in the air to make the object know to the user. By making many waves arrive at a focal point at the same time, a detectable pressure difference is created at that point, which exerts on a user’s skin when they hit the hand.

“Without haptics, it’s like you’re in a dream and you cannot feel the environment,” Sébastien Kuntz, a developers told New Scientists. “You can only look at it, you don’t have any feedback.”

The research paper, published in ACM Transactions on Graphics will be presented on Wednesday at the SIGGRAPH Asia 2014 conference later this week. Research led by Dr. Ben Long and colleagues Professor Sriram Subramanian, Sue Ann Seah and Tom Carter from the University of Bristol’s Department of Computer Science hopes to attract additional funding. Scientists expect the ultrasonic haptic technology to be licensed into various markets including consumer electronics, household appliances and the car industry as well as medicine.

For example, the new technology could “enable surgeons to explore a CT scan by enabling them to feel a disease, such as a tumour.”

“In the future, people could feel holograms of objects that would not otherwise be touchable, such as feeling the differences between materials in a CT scan or understanding the shapes of artefacts in a museum,” Ben Long said.

In November, Tom Carter, CTO at Ultrahaptics, said that, “The Ultrahaptics evaluation programme launch has received a very warm reception from those within the industry. A lot of interest has been registered from several blue-chip organisations and the additional funding will help us to meet the needs of our customers.”