Inside the Lab of One of the World's Last Holographers 86
MMBK writes "In the heyday of holography, back in the 1970s, there were four schools dedicated to the holographic arts around the world, and five studios in New York City alone. Today, there are only a few left in the world. And no one is holding the candle higher than Doctor Laser."
Holography's not dead (Score:4, Informative)
50 years of lasers (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Holographic movies (Score:5, Informative)
First, they are static.
That's a limitation of the way most holograms have been produced, not a limitation of holography in general.
Secondly, they are not color. This is due to the nature of laser light. It is monochromatic.
So use three of them, like the people who have built colour vector display projectors using red, green, and blue lasers.
There is no holographic output device, like a monitor, on which to show holograms.
That's only because no one has come up with a mass-market device of that type. It's certainly possible to do. I feel like a broken record posting a link to the MIT Media Lab's historical page on the topic [mit.edu], but there it is again.
Re:Holographic movies (Score:5, Informative)
First, they are static. There's no viable storage to contain reasonable amounts of holograph data, other than holograms themselves. So, old tape-style movies with separate frames are possible, but a computer display - not really, it would take many megabytes per second of the movie and no device has throughputs of this scale, storage notwithstanding. A video that uses generated (computed) image may be possible, a live movie - not yet.
Secondly, they are not color. Or more precisely, they are all colors. The rainbowy nature of a hologram seems inherent, it's very difficult to obtain anything near a clear color in a hologram. Some kind of RGB might be possible, but not nearly as crisp as flat image. Also, for a hologram you need a continuous image, you can't intermix pixels - one hologram per image, so it would need rather to be a Red frame-Green frame-Blue frame sequence, than an image containing mix of all.
Lastly, there is no holographic output device, like a monitor, on which to show holograms. The MarkII you linked achieves puny 144 scan lines in horizontal parallax only. That is how it translates to current displays. It could be defined as 256000 x 144 px display, the 256k pixels being sufficient to create one channel of holo photography.
Assuming we give up full parallax, and go with horizontal parallax and 800 scanlines (a low resolution for contemporary monitors) in RGB that would be 15GB per second, and not 3D in vertical direction. If we take the full parallax, we need about 256k x 256k pixels @ 180Hz (for 60Hz on each color compound). 85 femtosecond pixel clock in case of scanning laser like in the example, about 200GB per frame at 24-bit color depth, and 3 micron big pixels on a wide screen. Calculate data throughput needed for that yourself.
No, we aren't anywhere close to being able to produce a consumer grade holographic display.
Zebra Imaging in Austin, TX (Score:3, Informative)
I happen to know Michael Klug, one of the partners in Zebra Imaging [zebraimaging.com]. They're still doing holography like they've done for years now. Why do people think it's dead?
On a semi-related note, our family visited the Salador Dali Museum [salvadordalimuseum.org] in St. Petersburg, Florida, recently and they have a cool hologram of Alice Cooper that Dali did back in the '70s. Definitely worth checking out -- though I recommend waiting until their new building opens in Jan 2011.
-l
Re:WARNING (Score:3, Informative)
Yes, basically that. Holographic film is photographic film with a resolution high enough to capture the interference pattern between the reference laser and the reflected one; this pattern created diffraction gratings which made the 3D image afterwards. Some companies dedicated some time per year on their facilities for holographic, and that was enough to feed the small holo market. Holo film costed a premium, of course, but it was still feasible. Now nobody manufactures regular film anymore; if they were to keep the facilities doing just holographic, the cost would be absurd, so they just close down the factories and holography dies.
Most labs saw this coming, though, and have lots of film in stock. Unfortunately, the film doesn't last forever, and in a few years it will really die. Maybe someone will find a feasible way to make film in a lab, but I wouldn't hold my breath.