Holographic Disguise

When a character uses a personal Hologram projector to disguise themselves. Often with no explanation how they manage to keep it synced with their own body movements, especially if they are bigger or significantly smaller than the disguise.

Also covers instances of magic being used to project illusions, or uses of holograms as a Invisibility Cloak.

May involve Hard Light, often subject to Glamour Failure

Examples of Holographic Disguise include:

Anime/Manga

• In Wolf's Rain the wolves use psychic illusions to pose as humans.
• In Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha Striker S, Teana Lanster uses the Fake Silhouette spell to create multiple holographic copies of herself moving in different directions to hide her own movement. Since the copies are not perfect, she also distorts her own appearance to look like one of them.

Comic Books

• Nightcrawler of the X-Men.

Film

• A variation in Sky Captain and The World of Tomorrow: Totenkopf appears as a giant floating holographic head before his room on his secret island, but the heroes immediately note something's off. That's because Totenkopf has been long dead. It was a prerecorded message.
• Megamind uses a wristwatch-like device to create holographic disguises.
• Mater gets a set of holographic disguises in Cars 2. Making an effective one is more complicated than originally thought because Mater's bumps and dents sometimes poke through the hologram.

Literature

• Erek King and other Chee androids in Animorphs, combined with force fields.
• In the Xanth series, Sorceress Iris does this in the first book to make herself appear young and attractive, since her magical talent is Illusion.
• One of the first spells Aahz teaches Skeeve in Myth Adventures, as otherwise they'd really stick out in alternate dimensions.

Live Action TV

• The Syfy movie Anonymous Rex has dinosaurs posing as human using these.
• The Outer Limits episode Skin Deep. In this episode, they address the need to not move quickly, or else the hologram will flash and give you away.
• One such device was used in the pilot episode of Babylon 5 by an alien attempting to assassinate the Vorlon ambassador Kosh and frame commander Sinclair for it in the process.
• Star Trek had some episodes where somebody used holographic images to hide their identity when communicating with someone else via screen.
• Heroes: Candice from season 1 and early season 2 has the ability to cast illusions which make her appear different to people. In practice it's the same basic ability as Shapeshifting, but it's explicitly not that.
• In one episode of Stargate SG-1 an unnamed and markedly non-human alien race used holographic projectors to impersonate SGC personnel. Later a human assassin stole one of the salvaged projectors and used it to frame Jack for murder.

Tabletop RPG

• Mutant Future. A robot can have a Holo Screen device that projects a holographic image around it. The image can make the robot look like anything of roughly the same size, such as an outcropping of rock or an animal.
• The Disguise self" spell in Dungeons and Dragons
• Paranoia adventure The Yellow Clearance Black Box Blues. One of the R&D gadgets in Mission 2 is the Autoresponse Imager. It creates holographic disguises around the wearer, such as a combot or Teela-O-MLY. When it malfunctions it will create images like Peter Lorre (in black and white) and Wile E. Coyote.

Video Games

• In Secret Agent Clank, Clank can scan an enemy and produce a holographic disguise which will fool enemies other than the exact individual in question.
• The Journeyman Project: The Chameleon suit, time machine and holographic disguise.

Web Comics

• In PS238, students who can't just change into normal clothes (because they're part-machine, or bright blue, or whatever) get image emitters to help them blend in with the oblivious above-ground muggles.
• In Jix the Ambis and android characters often use either holo-watches or integrated projectors to pose as humans.
• The main characters of KiLA iLO have holographic projecting bracelets to look human, or in Ferris's case like a dog-rabbit.

Western Animation

• Jessica Benton from Jem and The Holograms uses a pair of holographic projectors in her earrings and a computer bequeathed to her by her inventor father to become rock singer Jem.
• On Spider-Man: The Animated Series, the Chameleon did his shapeshifting through a holographic device on his belt that would let him take pictures of people and then copy those images (his ability to imitate voices seems to be a natural one though).
• Commander Keith used one when infiltrating Wade's secret base in the opening episode of Voltron Force.
• Technically this is actually Mirage's full special ability in Transformers, though in practice he almost invariably ends up using it to camouflage himself into Invisibility.
• The protagonist of Phantom 2040 makes extensive use of holographic invisibility.