Calling it "holographic" was probably a bad idea because it generally makes people think about Star Trek. You're not quite as far off when you think about lasers shining through a photograph of an interference pattern in order to reproduce a light field that a human observer will perceive as a 3D object.
If you look a that photograph in normal light it just looks like a lot of black and white lines and blotches smeared out over the surface instead of the original object that was photographed. In a holographic model of the laws of physics, the entire content of the universe is encoded somehow onto a 2D surface. If you could somehow see that surface, it would not be obvious that it encoded anything in particular. Where the analogy falls down is that there is no laser that projects a 3D image from this surface. There's just a set of 2D laws operating on the 2D information. To anyone on the "inside", as it were, the universe still appears to be fully 3D with 3D laws of physics.
If you look a that photograph in normal light it just looks like a lot of black and white lines and blotches smeared out over the surface instead of the original object that was photographed. In a holographic model of the laws of physics, the entire content of the universe is encoded somehow onto a 2D surface. If you could somehow see that surface, it would not be obvious that it encoded anything in particular. Where the analogy falls down is that there is no laser that projects a 3D image from this surface. There's just a set of 2D laws operating on the 2D information. To anyone on the "inside", as it were, the universe still appears to be fully 3D with 3D laws of physics.