Gene Dolgoff

Gene (Eugene) Dolgoff (born 1950) is the founder, CEO, and CTO of The 3D Source, Inc., involved in the printing of 3-D moving images for advertising and promotions, labels, financial payment and ID cards, and medical imaging. He holds the same position in 3-D Vision, Inc., which is involved with the development of 3-D TV technologies, consumer and commercial 3-D video, and holographic video projection.
At the City College of the City University of New York, he majored in Physics, Mathematics, and Electrical Engineering, and minored in physiological-psychology.
Dolgoffs mother, Adele Dimenstein, was a Lithuanian refugee and was held at Stutthof, a Nazi concentration camp during WW II. After the war and her emigration to the US, she tried to recover funds her father said to have deposited at Swiss banks. She was unsuccessful, so that her son Eugene continued the inquiries after her death.
Dolgoff was an early developer of digital projection and started thinking about LCD projectors in 1968. He founded Projectavision, the world's first dedicated digital projection company in 1988 (listed on NASDAQ in 1990). With funding from DARPA, he worked on the development of the U.S. HDTV system. He has published several papers in 3-D imaging, optics, holography, the brain, and LCD video projection, and has more than 65 patents granted worldwide with many others pending.

In an interview on the 74th episode of the netcast "Home Theater Geeks", Dolgoff shared with host Scott Wilkinson how he was the one who suggested the Holodeck idea to Gene Roddenberry and how the two worked to define the parameters of the concept, which was used in Star Trek: The Next Generation, and other spinoffs. Dolgoff also suggested to Roddenberry that all the controls on the ship should be holographic, but Roddenberry could not see how that could be conveyed to the viewer, so that idea was not used. Startrek.com features two articles about how Mr. Dolgoff became the originator of the Holodeck.