Gregg Favalora is an inventor—meaning he is at once a garage tinkerer, digital visionary, and salesman. Holograms, with their sci-fi mystique, have sparked his intellect since he was a teenager. After all, he says, what technology could better express “the triumph of nerds”?

At 32, with six patents to his name and a dozen more for his company, Actuality Systems, Favalora proudly stands in the nerd phalanx. He grew up playing with circuits and the prism his grandfather, an electrical engineer, gave him. “I was bitten by the 3-D bug (a) because it’s just cool, and (b) because there have got to be applications for holograms that you can control—navigation, or finding oil, or showing a pregnant woman her baby.”

Actuality’s flagship product, Perspecta, combines 1950s mechanics—a screen spinning inside a transparent dome—with high-speed electronics, including a video game graphics board souped up to project computer data as slivers of light. To display a CAT scan as a 3-D image of a brain, for example, Perspecta’s patented algorithms chop the data into some 400 sections. The sections then flash through a projector microchip at the rate of 6,000 frames per second, recombining on the rapidly spinning screen to form a brilliantly detailed, animated image that can be viewed from any angle. Given the manifold potential applications, Favalora has attracted an array of customers: NASA, for studying star systems; Saudi Aramco, for exploring oil reserves; the U.S. Air Force, for battlefield visualization.

Perspecta is especially well suited for cancer treatment. In a darkened room at Actuality, a whirring Perspecta machine, fed by CAT scan data from a patient at Chicago’s Rush Medical Center, displays a translucent breathing lung. Favalora zooms in on the lung’s left side, revealing a bulging tumor colored yellow; with a mouse, he draws a virtual measuring tape across its width. “You see how difficult a target it can be, since the tumor moves with each breath,” he says. “In two dimensions, surgeons tend to be limited to imagining radiation beams that are coplanar to the floor; Perspecta helps them visualize all the possible angles.”

Dr. James Chu, who has helped develop Perspecta for clinical use, is leading a preclinical study of the technology at Rush. He says early results indicate a “significant advantage” over 2-D imaging. Actuality plans to release the results of the study, also underway at Tufts-New England Medical Center and Rhode Island Hospital, in November.

For Favalora, bringing Perspecta to market has been as challenging as refining the technology itself. He first fashioned a 3-D display for his senior project at Yale, using the spinning-screen concept, 32 flashing pen-light lasers, and some “horrific circuitry” to conjure the letter Y and Homer Simpson’s head. He won his first patent for the machine, along with a major collegiate inventors’ contest. A year later, in 1997, he left the Harvard Ph.D. program in engineering to launch Actuality from his basement apartment. “We had venture capitalists from the world’s biggest firms coming over to my house, and my roommates would be walking around with their bathrobes on,” Favalora recalls. The first prototype displayed a rendering of the HIV virus, which Favalora manipulated to show how scientists could use 3-D as a molecular research tool.

It took two and a half years for Actuality to get a foothold in the dot-com economy. “You’d read the newspaper and see a barbeque sauce portal got $40 million, and we just needed a measly $1.5 million to let researchers see what AIDS looks like,” Favalora says. Po Bronson wrote in the Wall Street Journal about Actuality’s stalled funding, noting that e-businesses are “stuffed to the gills with free-flowing venture cash. But who’s funding the technology of the future?” The investors responded, and by early 2000 Favalora had a team of six engineers working to turn the prototype into a commercial model.

As his team refined the design, Favalora focused on helping Perspecta find its market niche. “I’m not the guy with the soldering iron; I’m the guy with the telephone,” he says.

Favalora has a baby at home, and he’s already thinking about encouraging the urge to tinker. “Kids need to learn that the mechanisms of the world are malleable, and reconfigurable into whatever they dream.”