My mistake, but I'm not assigning magical powers. I'm aware of what a holographic display is, and the rift fulfils 3 of the 4 criteria. The lack of accommodation in my experience is not critical and the applicability to lytro is still valid.
As bane said, holography is a very specific thing. Most of the products I'm aware of today that claim to be "holographic" are things like head-up displays and red-dot gun sights. They use optics to make it appear as though a 2D image is appearing some distance behind the display surface. It's a clever, useful effect, but it is not holographic.
I think the author of the article is also leaving out one of the main interesting potential uses of depth-sensing cameras, which is to feed the output into a 3D printer. You don't need a holographic display (or even a faux-holographic depth display) for that.
Ng also mentions working with Zebra Imaging on printing such "holograms" [sic], so that's certainly a possible application. I'm not sure a lot of consumers would be interested in that, though, compared to simply showing pictures.
It's subtly different from similar see-through HUDs because you don't have to keep changing your focus back and forth to the HUD.
The DARPA guy I was talking to wasn't working on the display but on some other bits of the HUD and didn't know all the details about how it worked sadly. Looking for it later I think it was a holographic waveguide technology.
http://www.dodsbir.net/sitis/archives_display_topic.asp?Book...
It's just a pair of high DPI displays with nice low latency head tracking tech and better than average API support. Other than using photons, the Rift fulfills almost zero of the criteria for holography.