3D holographic DOOH is live in Hamburg. Now what?

A large-format 3D holographic screen went live in Hamburg this week. No glasses required. The image floats visibly in front of the display surface, readable from a distance, in broad daylight. People stopped. They filmed it on their phones. A few stood there longer than they would stop for any conventional billboard.

That reaction is real data. It is also, if you are a brand or spatial designer, a prompt worth sitting with. Because the question is not whether the technology is impressive. It clearly is. The question is whether it belongs in your toolkit or whether it is a one-season stunt that brands will cycle through once and then quietly retire.

What the technology actually does

These displays use a dense array of LEDs on a fan-based or flat-panel system to produce the illusion of depth without a physical object occupying that space. The image appears to extend forward from the screen plane. Viewed straight on, from the right distance, the effect holds. Walk too far to the side or get too close and the illusion breaks.

That constraint matters more than any specification sheet. Every medium has a viewing geometry. Cinema works in a dark room with a fixed seat. A billboard works at 60 km/h from a moving car. Holographic DOOH works at roughly 3 to 15 metres, near-frontal, with enough ambient light to read the depth cue but not so much that it washes the display out.

If you design for it as though it were a flat screen with a depth filter applied, you will waste the budget and probably embarrass the client. If you design for its actual geometry, you have something genuinely different from anything else on a high street.

Why most launches will underperform

Here is the pattern that plays out with almost every new display format. The first brands to run on it treat it as a novelty slot. They take an existing asset, a product render, a campaign film, add a depth layer in post, and ship it. The result looks like a standard ad that someone applied a parallax effect to. Passersby notice the screen, not the brand.

The Hamburg installation is already showing both versions of this story. The content built specifically for the volumetric format stops people in a way that repurposed flat assets do not. The difference is visible from across the street.

The gotcha here is production cost. Designing natively for a 3D display means building scene depth intentionally: foreground elements that carry the brand read, midground that rewards a longer look, background that anchors the space. That is closer to set design than to graphic design. Most campaign workflows are not structured for it, and most briefs do not budget for it.

The studios that will get good work out of this format in the next 18 months are the ones that start treating it as a spatial problem now, before the first brief lands.

Where it actually earns its place

Spectacle is not nothing. Earned media from a well-executed installation in a high-traffic urban location can outperform the media spend on the placement itself. Luxury, automotive, and entertainment categories have known this for years with experiential stunts. Holographic DOOH gives that dynamic a permanent, addressable, programmable surface.

That is a meaningful shift. A window installation for a single campaign is expensive and disposable. A holographic screen in a flagship location can be reprogrammed for every drop, every season, every city event. The amortisation logic starts to work if the location is right and the content pipeline is real.

Retail flagships and transit hubs are the obvious fit. So are locations where competitors are already spending heavily on conventional large-format, because depth is a genuine differentiator when everything around it is flat. A brand that owns the only 3D surface on a particular street corner has a category advantage that is hard to replicate quickly.

What does not work. placing a holographic screen somewhere the viewing geometry is wrong, running flat campaign assets on it, and hoping the format does the work. The technology cannot save a weak brief.

The design craft this demands

If you take a brief for this format seriously, three things change in your process.

First, you think in layers before you think in frames. Every asset needs a foreground read, because that is the layer doing the stopping. Then you design what rewards the person who pauses. Depth without hierarchy is just visual noise.

Second, motion logic is different. On a flat screen, motion carries the eye across the frame. On a volumetric display, motion along the z-axis, toward and away from the viewer, is the primary tool. Subtle push-pull on a hero object reads as alive in a way that lateral motion does not.

Third, you test it in the actual viewing conditions. A render on a laptop screen does not tell you how the depth cue holds in direct sunlight or how the foreground element reads when someone is approaching from 20 metres. Studios that build a physical review step for spatial formats into their process will catch problems that others ship.

None of this is exotic. It is the same discipline that good exhibition designers and theatrical set designers have applied for decades. The skill set exists. It just needs to be pointed at this format.

A practical take for brand and spatial designers

The Hamburg installation will be studied, filmed, and shared. Some brands will move fast and book the next available slot. Most of that first wave will produce content that wastes the format. A smaller group will take the time to understand the geometry, build the pipeline, and make something that actually rewards the medium.

The studios in that smaller group will set a reference point that everyone else competes against for the next few years. That is how every new display format has played out, from LED facades in the early 2000s to interactive projection mapping in the 2010s.

The question for any agency or in-house team reading this is not whether to add holographic DOOH to the capability list. It is whether to do the craft work first, before the brief arrives, so the answer to the client is not a guess.

We are working through exactly that at Studio Hyra now. If you are building a spatial or brand practice and want to think through what native 3D content production looks like at the campaign level, let's talk.