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3D street paintings and wall murals can create impressive optical illusions – but only at the right angle. These conventional drawings may look three-dimensional from the perfect perspective, but a real-time animated object (like the one shown here) can track your location and look 3D from wherever you are standing.

Starting with a simple cube, the shape is projected on a surface (such as a floor) by a video machine hooked up to an active computer program. As the viewer walks around the space, the projection adjusts itself accordingly. Sander Ter Braak has started small to show the potential of the technologies in play, but this is just the beginning.

For now, it is just a simple blue cube … but imagine the possibilities: 3D holographic landscapes that update in real time, video software you can download and project at home on walls, floors and ceilings, backgrounds you display on the outside of a building, three-dimensional gaming, effects, galleries and demos for both digital-world creations and real-life automobiles, rooms and more. Where people once thought that virtual-reality would happen overnight, we are learning that augmented reality and virtual worlds combined with experiments like this may finally start to blend realities and blur the line between digital and physical spaces.