Unfortunately, like most people it seems you might be fundamentally misunderstandings what the holographic principle means in some way.

It’s really hard to suss out what you might be missing so I’ll just briefly explain the whole thing…

The important concept of holography is not image production, it’s wave convergence. In this first image we see a blue and green wave running into each other to create “constructive interference.”

Those two waves are of exactly the same wavelength and lined up perfectly in “phase.”(a measure of peak-to-trough alignment) Below we have two waves of different frequencies interacting and as you can see, because they are of a different wavelength, it changes from constructive to destructive interaction, making the resultant wave amplitude greater or lesser.

There are two very different things most people generally think of as a hologram.

(I’ll ignore the Star Wars “help me Obiwan Kenobe” version that isn’t a real current technology as the third option people think of.)

The first cheaper version is a Lenticular image and isn’t a true hologram. You can recognize them by the corrugated surface that makes the funny sound when your nails drag across it. I’ll skip explaining how this simpler technology works.

Real holograms are the ones you’ve seen that are generally color changing or just green but have a very detailed image of some real object. The dove on the older Visa cards is one example.

These true holograms are an amazing and counter-intuitive phenomena that operates by building a “custom” image in the air at every possible viewpoint simultaneously. Furthermore, when you cut a hologram of a “star” for instance, in half you are not left with two images of a half star but two entire images of a whole star! (How Holograms Work)

All this is accomplished by a combination of two contributing complex behaviors. Wave interference combined with angle of incidence. Here’s a fun little video that gives a quick overview:

The holographic principle is a concept based upon the two crucial properties I have highlighted, but with another complication so let’s start with basics.

A normal hologram relies upon all the various angles light can reflect off a flat surface. The light coming from the top left and the bottom right of the holographic surface interfere with each other in your eye and those combined angles are very important for shaping the image you perceive.

So, first you need to understand that reflection of light relies upon the incoming angle and the surface. In the image below we have light coming in from just one angle. (but light is coming in from various different places to strike a reflective surface in reality. Keep that in mind when looking at this simplification below)

While the second surface above is changing the outcome of the angle, a hologram does a slightly different trick by changing the phase and frequency instead of just the angle of reflection. The point here to remember, however, is that there is lot going on at any reflective surface. That’s why you look into a mirror and can see another person in a room and they can also see you. The light scattered off you from lighting sources is going to the mirror toward their eyes (and every other point on their body too, incidentally) and at the very same time, the light scattering off their body is reflecting off the mirror converging on your eyes. (and converging on tons of other places on your body etc)

This should make you realize that at any given moment, if you freeze time, there is an image of the whole room, at (converging on) every single point, anywhere in the that room. This is why you can see the whole room from anywhere in the room. There’s zillions of possible versions of the image of the room hanging in the air during our frozen-time version of reality.

There’s a lot going on with light bouncing all over the place and converging!

The trick of holography is getting light to line up in just the perfect way so that when it does converge, it creates a specific image on the eye via interference effects. (amazing right?)

So now remember that light can come in from all different angles, so if we think of all the light incoming, it’s all bouncing off each individual point of a surface in a sphere shape. (since it’s incoming from every possible angle) Now when we think of just two points on a holographic surface and how the light coming off it interacts with the reflections from another point, we can see that the angles create interference patterns in the air.

That ends up looking a little like this for single colored “monochromatic” (one frequency/wavelength) light: (…and this is just a 2D slice)

So now we can finally add the last complication that will give you the first seeds of the idea of how holographic principle is supposed to actually work.

In all the cases, we’ve been talking about a flat surface doing the reflection which allows you to expect the normal rule that “angle of incidence equals angle of reflection,” but in holographic principle the “hologram” of the universe is created from a curved surface and that creates a whole lot more complication.

Let’s look at curved surfaces from a moment:

So whenever we have a curved reflective surface it will distort the image like the Chicago “bean” sculpture.

This change of angles is why you can see yourself upside down in a spoon reflection. Beyond the convergence point labeled “image location” below, the top is being directed to the bottom and the bottom to the top.

Now you finally have all you need to start understanding holographic principle. READY? THEN, HOLD ON TO YOUR HAT!

Holographic principle is a deep and interesting correspondence between two very different versions of modern physics theory: Anti de Sitter Space (AdS) and Conformal Field Theory (CFT)

The reason it’s called holographic principle is the way the two of them fit together is just like a hologram projected off the inside of a sphere:

So, the hologram projected inside a circle (an anti-de Sitter space) like this ends up being a crazy fractal looking thing:

But that’s just one slice and when we start adding more dimensions we can allow it to evolve over time.

Unfortunately, I cannot easily explain how the dimensional difference allows for spacetime curvature and gravity to be produced, because it seems to simply be modeled, (described) not really actually explained. So it’s more of a statement that space IS curved near matter, not that matter curves space. There is more of a correlation than causation as I currently understand it in this theory.

Thus, through this specific description, there is a connection between space and time intimated to be responsible for gravity in the holographic universe. (as we would expect from relativity) Explaining quantum gravity, however, is beyond the scope of this answer but I’ll give you my favorite current “intuitive explanation” source for that research here in Klee Irwin’s site: Quantum Gravity Research - Quantum Gravity Research

So, spacetime simply IS bent but the “hologram” produced is everything in the universe so the mass containing objects (matter) you think of as doing the bending, isn’t necessarily the cause as much as a correlated phenomena.

While we think of the massive objects as the “holograms” being produced, truthfully the whole space in which the convergent waves interact constructively or destructively is all one hologram. There’s just one “hologram” which is the whole universe. (with lots of possible viewing points)

This is only confusing because, just like normal holograms, we call the surface AND the wave phenomena produced -and finally even the perception of an image - all by just one word: “Hologram.” Then we also call non-holograms by the name as well! That’s a total of about 5 or 6 different things all being called by the word. This is just a big deficiency in our language that makes an already complex subject far more confusing than it should be.

Finally a little direction on how all this might add up to more than just an image but a physical reality via pilot-wave mechanics:

As you should be aware, there is a wave nature to matter at the atomic level. You’ve probably heard of “wave-particle duality” explained in some semi-magical, weird way. In most modern explanations, there’s particles apparently “entangled” which are magically affecting each other at a distance. None of this makes much sense until you have one set of new experiments carried out by John Bush at MIT.

In his experiments, he proves that all the weird quantum behaviors can be explained in rational and understandable terms. He starts from a circular corral where, just like an anti-de Sitter space, the waves are reflecting off a circular border and converging in the middle to create some strange and apparently chaotic phenomena that perfectly fits with what we see in Quantum Mechanics. (though this is a simplification because there is also local reactivity of the medium that is also responsible)

Furthermore, as you can see, the information needed to create the next bounce trajectory for the walker was, at some previous point, spread out around at the edges of the corral. (creating an AdS/CFT-like correspondence between activity at the edges and activity at the droplet)

This is why the chaotic movement is directly related to the Faraday wave mode of the cavity/corral. Reflection from the border is playing a crucial role in the behavior of the particle.

Think this through for a moment: When the walker strikes the surface it creates a wave that, later, strikes the external border of the corral and then reflects back to the walker at a later time and interferes with itself at the location to create a shape to the surface that will alter the bounce angle.

Properties of the particle (relating to its “position and momentum”) were “smeared out” and “nonlocal” until the bounce actually occurs because the incoming wave convergences create the “holographic” surface the walker interacts with and creates.

Hopefully this leaves you with the impression that a “hologram,” at its core, is just wave convergence and interference phenomena and not really the image eventually produced that you usually think of.

If you’re interested in speculative science, I highly recommend this paper on the Neoclassical Interpretation (NI) of quantum and relativistic physics that is emerging from the advancement of all these new understandings and experiments that have emerged in the past couple decades:

Introduction to the Neoclassical Interpretation: Quantum Steampunk (PDF)

Finally, I’ll leave you with this entertaining compilation video on the walker experiments:

Edit 9/8/2022: This article is referenced in