Whatever became of holography? (2011)
americanscientist.org106 points by cainxinth 7 hours ago
106 points by cainxinth 7 hours ago
Very few people in the comments seem to understand what holography is. A hologram is not a “3D display” that mimics a sci-fi movie or TV show. A hologram is photographic media / display technology that records and transmits phase as well as intensity of incident photons. By capturing all the properties of the electromagnetic field that strikes the film, and re-emitting the same EM wave when stimulated, the hologram ends up being a full “3D picture” because after all, the light that hits your eyes ends up being the same as if you were looking at the actual scene. But that’s a consequence, not the defining property.
3blue1brown has a great explainer video on what holograms are: https://youtu.be/EmKQsSDlaa4
I don't understand the distinction. You said it's not a 3d display, then described a 3d display technology.
That's like saying a CRT doesn't display a picture because it energizes pixels only one at a time.
Yes, it's a tech that can be used to display in 3d, but not sure that's the best categorization choice overall.
You can also make things like holographic lenses [1].
And, "display" doesn't seem right. If you recorded a still image, it's a (literal) record of the light field of a scene that lets you view the scene in 3d, like a magnifying glass functioning from all perspectives [2]. You do get the "display" of a 3d scene out of it, when used that way.
Fun fact, you can make your own at home with gelatin, some photo chemicals [3], a laser, and a ludicrously stable table. DIY hologram is going to be one of the first things I do when I retire.
[1] Used in HUDs, like in fighter jets. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holographic_optical_element
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iMdvBmePm9U and https://www.youtube.com/shorts/DnjATyPuFFk
The irony is that actual holography is arguably more impressive than the sci-fi version once you understand what's happening
Dan Smalley's research lab at BYU is actively developing 3D volumetric holography technology.
The video is a bit old, but it has a few fun demos of the capabilities they've developed.
Strictly speaking that's not holography if I understood it correctly. Holography is based on interference created by a surface with a special pattern, and it doesn't require any matter other than the diffractive surface. Whereas here they say they move "particles" (what particles? dust? atoms?). Still pretty cool of course and a thing on its own.
I'm not sure if you can edit, but consider removing the ?is= parameter, to keep the link anonymous.
Seems fun but also no idea how that could be scaled or made to work in consumer products.
It's "just" an engineering problem at that point though. It works. First it'll be at Disneyland for tens of millions of dollars and then it'll be in Vegas for millions of dollars and then eventually we'll be able to get it at BestBuy for $1,999 in 40 years.
I wanted to pick up doing holography again, but I discovered that Integraf, founded by legend TJ ( https://www.integraf.com/about/tung-h-jeong ), stopped selling the film and supplies.
Much of the supply chain for modern hobbyist holography was sourced out of Russia, and the ongoing wars have made those materials unavailable.
There are some newer processes out there, but there were probably thousands of us that grew up using those HoloKit holography kits distributed by TJ.
You can get holographic film and kits from http://www.litiholo.com. These are not silver halide but are Covestro Bayfol HX photopolymer film which require no post processing.
Oh, I'd love to have a spare $6000 sitting around that I could buy^H^H^H reserve a holographic printer.
And a battery powered laser
Wow, they have a laser with a shutter! The Litiholo kit just gives you a basic laser diode, and they don't tell you that you have to let the laser warm up before exposing the hologram. I made so many smeared/blurry holograms before I figured out you have to block the laser, turn it on and warm up, then unblock the laser.
What is unique about the film and supplies?
The traditional emulsion had peak sensitivity at 633nm. I don't know much about it otherwise but it was much easier to handle as glass plates rather than film. Russia led the science of this for decades.
I went to a whole art exhibition of holograms as a kid that blew me away, and I've always wondered why holograms are so rare ever since. I had one for a while, the famous one of the microsope with the lens that you can actually look through to see a computer chip inside. There's nothing else like it.
Maybe if you could figure out a digital work flow with digital development method it could really take off. But holograms are analog and hard to deal with.
I suspect, for your typical art nerd, holography is prohibitively expensive and limiting in expressiveness. And for your typical tech nerd, it's also prohibitively expensive and limiting in expressiveness.
Probably true, but I reckon there's surely at least some money to be made for a commercial enterprise if anyone wanted to go big, and nobody has. Get the price down via mass production and automation. Get some holograms into the shops. Sell them in an online store (you can buy holograms online already, but only a few from small operators at high prices, or second-hand). Let people send you their 3D models or 3D scenes and you'll send them a hologram of it. You can even do short animations (there's nothing stopping every new perspective being a different frame!). Have your AI convert people's photos to 3D and then output a hologram of them.
You do need to have a decent point light to shine on it, but you can sell that too. You can even sell a frame that has a clip-on light that's just right[1], although a perfect lighting setup is not required.
[1] Like Dutch Holographic Laboratory does: https://holoprint.com/pages/components.php#Telescope
>Let people send you their 3D models or 3D scenes and you'll send them a hologram of it.
Oh hey, I have worked in exactly this business (taking people's random 3D models and bullying a rendering pipeline into feeding a digital holographic printer). It's hard, for many reasons. Mainly it's that holograms are expensive in materials, labor, and capital outlay (adding up to several k just for something the size of a piece of paper), and mass production of digital holograms isn't really possible without massive further outlay - writing them is time consuming, and copying them is fraught. It's like being a graphic design / print workshop, except everything is way more fiddly and expensive and nobody wants your product.
Analog holograms are a bit more tractable. But that's even more niche on the consumption end.
It wasn't that prohibitive. When I did it, I had a helium neon laser recovered from an old supermarket scanner, but it can be done with one of those $10 keychain lasers. The chemicals weren't too expensive, but the holographic plates could get pricey if you wanted a lot of them.
I had the opportunity to work with a lenticular display a few years back. Just takes an HDMI input and can render a 3d scene like you'd build in Unity and you'd be able to see at least a range of aspects of the image at once by looking from different angles. Not fully 360 but maybe 90 degrees of perspective at once. It was neat but we spent weeks trying to make an impressive demo and none of it was fun for more than 5 seconds.
There are a few of us around who still make them. I do film photography and have my own darkroom already for that purpose. Adding holography on top of that is a relatively minor lift, and every once in a while the urge strikes and I'll get the equipment out.
The main challenge is that there are, to my knowledge, only two remaining manufacturers of the plates - in France, and in Russia.
3blue1brown’s video on holography is one of the coolest math videos I’ve ever seen. Basically magic.
One of the most magical parts of the hologram for me is that if you cut it (the film media) in half, you have two copies of the hologram. The reduction in size is a loss of resolution - but the scene stays the same.
Though that also is part of the reason that a they're not more common. Each hologram is the film rather than a "print".
If someone wants to make 100 holograms to be able to sell them as more than a one off art piece you're making 100 units of the film.
> if you cut it (the film media) in half, you have two copies of the hologram.
A hologram is much like a window, you can look through a big window or a small window, and see what's at the other side both times, but the big window still gives you a lot more viewing angles than the small one. Cutting a hologram in half gives you half a hologram, not two copies of the hologram, it's just that you can change your viewing angle to still see what's on the other side, but that will be a different image than with the full hologram.
That's Fourier space f**kery for you.
More substantially: cropping areas of the amplitude plot in freq space reduces detail but preserves overall image identity.
You could also cut them into pieces to duplicate the holograms. They would obviously be smaller. A cut hologram includes the whole hologram, just from the perspective of that part of the cut piece.
Glass plates likely wouldn't be the best choice for this.
Film sheets might be doable.
https://www.geola.com/product/pfg-01-film/ for a Lithuanian distributor. 35cm (about 1 foot) isn't that large. Might be able to cut it into 4ths (classic 4"x5") ... 2"x3" is a small size (12 per sheet).
Agree, that is the first hologram that truly blows my mind. Literally windows to different dimension.
Oof, there's a pretty impressive startup in the space: https://lookingglassfactory.com/
Holographic display tech is interesting stuff, but the tech in the article refers to laser holography on a holographic emulsion that is developed similar to a photographic chemical development process.
There's a phenomenal book on this topic called "Holographic Visions" (ISBN 978-0198571223).
I've had the pleasure of working behind the scenes on holography related stuff (primarily optomechanics) for years now. Fascinating field full of phenomenally interesting minds.
The touchable holograms, “fairy lights” seems to have not advanced at all, perhaps a dead end, but when I first read about it and thought of the possibilities it was all utterly amazing.
The issue with these is that it’s very difficult to remove the sound that occurs when hot plasma expands.
So in addition to the skin damage that’s super obvious in this vid, you have this sharp buzzing crackling sound like some turbo sting gun.
I remember seeing an article in OMNI Magazine decades ago about "holographic data storage" which would have been incredibly high-density.
Not sure what became of it.
NYC also used to have the "Museum of Holography" which I was fortunately able to visit but may not exist anymore.
3D stuff, in general, seems to not do well. Not sure why! (as I dust off my Vision Pro)
I went to New York’s Museum of Holography in the 1980’s. It was on Mercer Street but it closed in the 90’s. I remember it was incredible, though, and I saw some techniques on display that I haven’t seen matched since.
Widely used in commercial and military weapons sights.. EOTech (famous/infamous depending). The legendary FN (Belgian military contractor) just announced one.
There used to be a hologram art gallery in San Francisco where you could get a hologram of yourself created.
https://computerchronicles.tv/#episode/1610 (Video, skip to 11:47)
Monochromatic laser light makes these things look other-worldly. They look amazing and they look increadible, but its not even close to uncanny valley it's so unreal.
I got to make one during a visit to the MIT museum maybe 25 years ago, was neat.
They always felt gimmicky to me, like something out of a kid's museum, and I imagine I'm not the only one.
Its this odd often blurry and hard to see thing that certainly has interesting aspects but is not something you can create easily at home, unlike a photograph. Then the world changed and mobile devices ruled and everyone had a good camera sensor in their pocket, TVs were thinner and higher resolution than ever, games started looking amazing, etc and there really wasn't any room for less practical things like holograms.
I think its one of those things we just weirdly romanticize like a car that is also a boat or a jetpack, but in reality has no real place as a consumer product.
There were different degrees of quality with holograms. To my recollection, a hologram on glass, that you illuminated with a laser, were stunning in clarity and sense of three dimensionality.
All other variants were degrees of magnitude worse.
The Science Museum in London used to have a life-sized holoportrait of Denis Gabor. It looked like a milky plate until you pushed the button that turned on the laser, and... there he was. Stunning.
There was a short-lived flurry of art establishment interest in high quality glass holograms, but the process is just too expensive and fragile to create non-niche art.
I always expected that at some point we'd have dynamic holographic displays, but the processing and resolution requirements are insane.
Holographic film has a resolution in the region of 100,000 to 250,000 ppi, which is quite a bit more than 300dpi for print or a few thousand PPI for plain old film. If you could build a 27" display with that resolution you'd need maybe 1TB per frame at a minimum.
You could probably apply quite a bit of compression to get that down on input, but that's still the order of a workable frame store memory.
Multiply by three for colour.
They're also useful for analytical purposes.
It's possible to do this with digital methods, too, but the lower spatial resolution of most digital LCDs and most digital camera sensors (compared to film) limits it somewhat. But I think it'd be more practical than the analog film based analytical holograms.
You are describing transmission holograms, the best visual fidelity but it had to be illuminated by laser light. Reflection holograms had a small field of depth before getting blurry but we're visible in white light. Dichromate Gelating (DCG) holograms were also white-light visible, had a smaller depth field than reflection holograms, but we're very sharp and bright. A lot of novelties were made using the DCG process, like novelty glasses that had alien eyeballs in the lenses.
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