Inside the Lab of One of the World's Last Holographers

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."

Holograms are like no other media

[MacroRodent]

"Half-assed hologram taken"? I wonder if you have seen a real, well-made hologram of a person? They are spooky in their combination of 3D, extremely high resolution (almost infinite, in fact) and absence of motion and color. Nothing else is like them ("death masks", casts of a deceased persons faces, might come closest).

Holographic movies

[camperdave]

The way I see it, there are four main problems with holograms. First, they are static. Sure you have slit holograms, or rainbow holograms, like they used in Logan's run, but those are not true holograms. They are stereograms. Secondly, they are not color. This is due to the nature of laser light. It is monochromatic. Third, you can't have mass viewings. Holograms tend to have only a narrow range of angles from which they can be viewed to good effect. Fourth, you can't generate them on your computer. Let me clarify before you start posting links to open source hologram generation software. There is no holographic output device, like a monitor, on which to show holograms. They are all done with photographic film. That means processing, slow turn around, and expense... the very reasons film was ditched for digital for regular photographs.

Re:Holographic movies

[heitikender]

On Causality You see, when you ask why something happens, how does a person answer why something happens? For example, Aunt Minnie is in the hospital. Why? Because she went out on the ice and slipped and broke her hip. That satisfies people. But it wouldn't satisfy someone who came from another planet and knew nothing about things... When you explain a why, you have to be in some framework that you've allowed something to be true. Otherwise you're perpetually asking why... You go deeper and deeper in various directions. Why did she slip on the ice? Well, ice is slippery. Everybody knows that-no problem. But you ask why the ice is slippery... And then you're involved with something, because there aren't many things slippery as ice... A solid that's so slippery? Because it is in the case of ice that when you stand on it, they say, momentarily the pressure melts the ice a little bit so that you've got an instantaneous water surface on which you're slipping. Why on ice and not on other things? Because water expands when it freezes. So the pressure tries to undo the expansion and melts it... I'm not answering your question, but I'm telling you how difficult a why question is. You have to know what it is permitted to understand... and what it is you're not. You'll notice in this example that the more I ask why, it gets interesting after a while. That's my idea, that the deeper a thing is, the more interesting... (Richard Feynman) If you know how, then you know why.

Re:Holographic movies

[l3v1]

The way I see it, there are four main problems with holograms.

You seem focused on finding defficiencies, yet you fail to see a very unique advantage: resolution and density. I can't think of any other tqchnique that would be able to come close in resolution. E.g. holographic microccopy. And the technology didn't go away, just check topics on holographic data storage

Holograms are amazing.

[FiloEleven]

As mentioned in the movie, the resolution of a hologram is the wavelength of the light used. With a specially built microscope, you could actually look at the bacteria captured in film, even though your subject might be a macroscopic object.

The image you see when you look into a hologram is a virtual image, like that of a mirror. What's interesting and has to my knowledge never been examined for implications is that there is an invisible but real image behind the film.

Each half of a holographic plate sliced in half still contains the entire image, only at half the size. The halving can be repeated indefinitely, within physical limits. (Incidentally, this is one of several references to holograms made in The Book of the New Sun.)

The most interesting aspect is holography is that each part in some sense contains the whole. There is a theory of physics that postulates that the universe is structured as a hologram. It never gained much traction yet it was never disproven, and its creator David Bohm was a well-respected physicist. Additionally, Karl Pribam is a psychologist who believes that our brains operate holographically, our brainwaves acting as the laser with our neurons as film.

This may indeed be a technology that is simply ahead of its time, virtually useless to us without a much more mature understanding of physics or without the insight of some genius on how to do more with holograms than make eerie monochromatic volumes.

Re:Holographic movies

[Anonymous Coward]

True that higher resolution leads to higher quality. But you conveniently omit the fact that resolution of 1000x1000 is barely sufficient to get a hologram of two dots.

You are making a little confusion here. The lowest resolution required for a holographic pattern is the one required to diffract light. For example, with 20 fringes per millimeter you can diffract visible light - it isn't *that much*. I'm lazy on calculations right now, but you don't require that much diffraction area to get a *simple* hologram. Now associate this with the, "higher resolution leads to higher quality (or in better words, more information)"

"discrete captured from a high-resolution CCD"? Bullshit. A 100 megapixel camera will produce a hologram that is no more than few rough, blurred shapes.

Your claim is in contradiction of several experimental results of mine.

Of course they are not named holographic projectors, because while there is a wide range of 3D display devices, none of them uses holography.

I'm not talking about consumer display devices. There are *other* devices which operate under the interferometry principles.

And if there's so much competition and development, as you claim, why does the article state to the contrary?

The article is bullshit. Holography evolved a lot since Denisyuk and Stephen Benton.

Why still no holographic data storage, which is hmuch easier than holographic display?

This should answer a lot of your questions:
http://www.colossalstorage.net/

(I'm not affiliated with them)

And why posting as AC?

I don't want to me or my research group to be associated with any of this discussion. I just wanted to say that in contrary to what TFA makes people feel, holography is not dead - it's the future.