The holodeck: a room that can create an interactive 3-D hologram of just about any environment you can think of. It’s been the dream of Star Trek nerds ever since The Next Generation debuted on TV. Well brace yourself, Trekkies, and try not to soil those Starfleet unitards in glee. The U.S. intelligence community had heard your prayers and is now taking a step towards building its own holographic simulator.

Iarpa, the intelligence community’s advanced research outfit, announced this month that’s it’s embarking on a Synthetic Holographic Observation (SHO) program, a quest to build a system that...