In theory, controlling a flying drone shouldn’t be much different from piloting a helicopter, but without a human in the cockpit, visualizing the drone’s current position relative to environmental obstacles can be tricky. This week, researchers Chuhao Liu and Shaojie Shen from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology revealed an intriguing new solution that uses holographic augmented reality hardware to create live 3D terrain maps, enabling drone pilots to simply point at targets visualized above any flat surface.