Conception
The Star Trek Holodeck was inspired by New York inventor and holographer, Gene Dolgoff, who is also the inventor of the digital projector . His holography laborator, built in 1964, was the first holography lab in New York City.
In 1973, Dolgoff was giving a technical paper on his holographic model of the human brain at a conference in Prague. There he met Melanie Toyofuku, also based in New York, who became a close friend of Dolgoff’s. After spending a great deal of time with Dolgoff learning about his pioneering work in holography, including visiting his holography laboratory in New York City, Melanie introduced him to her close friend Gene Roddenberry, who was visiting New York with his wife Majel Barrett in late 1973.
Dolgoff spent the day with Ronddenberry and his wife showing them many holograms and explaining his theories of “matter holograms”, the holographic nature of the universe, and the holographic nature of the human brain. Dolgoff emphasized the importance holography will play in the future and that if Gene Roddenberry wanted to be accurate he must introduce holography into his Star Trek scripts, including the concept of a holographic “room” for the crew to use for amusement, training, and other purposes.
Dolgoff had won 4th prize in the IEEE student paper contest in 1968 in which he described how such a holographic “TV system” could work (in addition to describing how to use it to provide a machine capable of invisibility). Roddenberry wrote the concept into Star Trek: The Next Generation, in its debut in 1987. However, the concept had already been tested in 1974 in Star Trek: the Animated Series.
Read more about this topic: Holodeck
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