Making Holograms In The Kitchen

Paul writes "Over at www.litiholo.com is a newly launched hologram kit that lets you make your own holograms at home. No, it's not Princess Leia asking you for help, but it's still pretty cool making a hologram on your kitchen table. Particularly interesting is the instant hologram film that makes holograms with no developing (kind of a Polaroid film for holograms). The hologram kit costs $99, including the laser, film, and everything else."

Comments

Leia pic

[Tofino]

Any takers on bets for how long it'll take Lucas lawyers to cease-and-desist that Leia framegrab off their front page? :)

Holograms in doom 3

[freelunch]

Doom 3 has some cool rendered holograms.

A Princess Leia hologram would have made a nice easter egg.

there was...

[Striker770S]

something on the history channel a few years back about a company that was developing a hologram storage device by waving some sort of wand around in the air and the picture is displayed that way. But the look to it was rediculous, but this is not a completely new idea.

$99? how about ~$20!

[k_hokanson]

instructions here.

Re:(sniff) farewell my misspent youth.

[RobertB-DC]

Gone it seems are the days of making holograms in a basment with a water bed frame filled with sand and a Helium Neon laser scrounged from an old Safeway UPC code reader.

You jest, or perhaps you don't? I remember trying to figure out how to set up exactly such an arrangement after visiting one of the first hologram stores in the early '80s. It was in Dallas, in the Quadrangle, I think... I was an early teen, so it wasn't like I drove there myself. It was the coolest freakin' things I'd ever seen -- better than Pac Man.

Years later, there was an outfit selling holograms at Dallas' West End Marketplace -- and I was able to take my kids to check it out. They thought it was cool, but I don't think they were nearly as bowled over as I was.

That's why I'm not sure I'll shell out the $99 for this kit for Christmas. I just don't think they'll like it as much as the [Select Kid, Present from WishList where Price < 100] they've been asking for. OTOH, I may send the URL to my wife in case she can't figure out what to get me...

Hadamard Transform Holograms

[DumbSwede]

When working for Wolfram Research many years ago I remember someone working on or with a third party package to generate Holograms from 3 D computer models. It would print out a diffraction pattern, which I believe had to then be photographically reduced and illuminated like any other Hologram. The reduction phase because printers hadn't sufficient resolution (and probably still don't) for small visible wavelengths of light (though if you could "see" in microwaves I guess the original would do just fine).

A little Googling shows this to be something called a Hadamard Transform.
In the Early to Mid '90s, fast computers had to churn away to make fuzzy cubes and other simple objects.

With better computers and better printers the rendering should be faster and the reduction phase not as extreme. Also with larger Holographic plates the results should be less fuzzy.

Does anyone know the state of Computer generated Holograms? Real geeks wouldn't make holograms with old fashion photographic plates, but in the guts of their over-clocked AMD boxen.

Re:Hadamard Transform Holograms

[photonic]

I did try this some time ago as a friday afternoon experiment at work (I'm in optics). What you basically do is take some black and white image, take the 2D-fourier and add some random phase noise. This gives you an image that looks just like white noise. Print this with a laser printer on a transparency and hold it in front of an expanded laser beam. Et voila, there's your original image back. There's one caveat: This is essentially a black and white 'amplitude' hologram which contains no phase information like a real hologram. The result is that you always get a ghost image that is point symmetric with the original.

For more details have a look at this thread, it refers to a paper that explains the math.

Since the submitter is linked to the company...

[Jason1729]

Hopefully he will read this.

I love the idea, but 2x3" plates are a bit on the small side, I've always done 4x5s. I sort of lost interest in holography because of lack of time to develop the film, so I might have to pick up this kit.

My question is do/will you have larger plates, and in the kit, is the laser diode and optics suitable to cover the larger area?

Jason
ProfQuotes

Misleadingness

[Deorus]

Ok, this may sound rather lame for those of you who understand what this is all about, but I would like to know anyway: What kind of hologram are we talking about here? Is it really possible to project a tridimensional image in the space? If so, could someone explain me the science behind that?

I am sorry once again for asking all these questions, but I've been trying to figure it by myself and unfortunately never found anything conclusive.

Thanks in advance.

Re:Photos?

[MichaelSmith]

So what we really need, is a kind of monitor which can manipulate the phase and direction of electromagnetic waves emitted or transmitted to the eye

I think there are new monitors out there which are basically an array of LED's. Could the same thing be done with laser diodes? An extremely fast back end processor could pulse different diodes in the array to product the required 3D image (not the interference pattern, the image which results from the interference pattern

Poor student's holography

[pongo000]

Back in the day when school was uphill both ways, we used to make holographs by taking a coffee can with the bottom cut out and wrapping a sheet of AGFA red-sensitive photo paper around the inside of the can. We'd set the coffee can on the table, empty end down, and set a small eraser in the middle. The eraser had a small hollow with a single drop of mercury. Put an item of interest somewhere between the erasure and the film, then illuminate the mercury with a laser that's suspended overhead. Develop, and then view the paper backlit by the laser. Instant holograph!

The effect was very impressive. I guess nowadays, you'd have the most trouble finding mercury...

Hand-drawn holograms

[William Tanksley]

The really fun stuff is hand-drawn, and all you need is a compass (with two points) and a shiny but scratchable surface. Oh, and a bit of time.

Hand Drawn Holograms.

-Billy

Re:Hand-drawn holograms

[Tablizer]

I like the story about how the idea was formed. A guy looked at a just-waxed car and saw that some of the shiny archs looked deeper than the surface of the car. I have seen this effect also in car scratches. Being an amature artist, he realized that the nature of the arcs created an artificial parallax. Parallax is the triangulation that humans use to perceive depth. Thus, he perfected a similar technique to control the positioning of the archs to make planned 3D imaged. He used everyday observations to invent a new technique that everybody used to think required expensive equipment. They could have made holograms in the 1800's on metal plates even without anything resembling lasers. It is all a matter of controlled, carefully-planned scratching and knowledge of geometry.

Optics bench

[delibes]

I did this in high school. We didn't have a nice optics bench that could prevent vibrations, so the solution was a paving slab resting on a partially inflated bicycle inner tube, and a sign in the corridor to tell people to trend lightly and not slam the door.

Suprisingly it worked fairly well. We produced a few small holos of toy cars and stuff, using some Ilford film (can't remember which type) a HeNe laser, and guessing the exposure time. Fixing the film didn't seem to work well though - the holograms tended to start fading or something after a few days.

Do kids get to do stuff like this in school these days? I would like to think that cool science things are routinely taught now, since technology like lasers are everywhere. Probably wishful thinking.

It's not going to work.

[sakusha]

Nobody's going to be making holograms in their kitchen for $99. There are obviously only a few people in this thread who have actually made holograms (people like me). You can tell them because they're all talking about elaborate antivibration systems. You have to kill vibrations down to below the wavelength of light in order to make holograms.
I took a class in holography at my university. We used the research lab in the physics building's basement, using serious research-quality lasers and optics, and an optical table that weighed 2500 pounds sitting on a vibration-dampening cushion, atop a steel and concrete pillar buried deeply into the ground til it hit bedrock. And even THEN, we had to use the lab at about 2AM when the street traffic died down, because even a car driving down the street could induce enough vibration to ruin the hologram.
Eventually the Physics department built a new laser lab next to a riverbank, on a rarely used cul-de-sac on the edge of the campus. That reduced a lot of the vibration from street traffic. Unfortunately, their new multimillion-dollar frequency-tunable laser, the centerpiece of the lab, caught on fire the first time it was turned on, and that was kind of the end of the laser lab.

Re:Nothing new

[Anonymous Coward]

Popular Electronics had a great article on making your own holograms in 1992.

PE published an earlier cover story on how to build your own HeNe laser in December 1969. The tube could be purchased from Edmund Scientific. For unknown reason, the schematic published in the magazine didn't yield a functioning power supply, but the same components laid out as described in a booklet that accompanied the tube worked fine. The laser was suitable for making transmission holograms, which I did.

At about the same time, Scientific American, in its monthly The Amateur Scientist section, published an article on how to build your own gas laser from scratch, be it HeNe or Ar. The article was written from first hand experience by a vice president at SpectraPhysics. I was lucky enough to meet him through his son, who went to my high school, and was privileged with a tour of his garage, including the oxy-acetylene torch he used to blow the glass and a demonstration of his home-built Argon ion laser. It was truly awesome!

Scientific American archive

[Anonymous Coward]

For anyone interested in the classics, several articles on building lasers, holography, etc. are archived in the book "Light and its uses: Making and using lasers, holograms, interferometers, and instruments of dispersion: readings from Scientific American". A vice president of Spectra Physics named Heumann wrote two of the articles ca. 1968-1970, on the subject of building HeNe and Argon ion lasers from scratch. I had the privilege of touring his garage, where he built the lasers. Demo of oxy-acetylene torch for blowing glass and a functional 4 mW Argon laser was awesome!

See amazon.com.

It will probably work fine.

[bitingduck]

You don't have to have that much stuff.

I satsified my art requirement as an undergrad by taking a holography as art semi-independent study. I was a physics student, and the other guy taking it was an art student. I don't think he ever managed to make a hologram because he couldn't align the spatial filters. My art sucked, but I had no trouble getting good holograms.

There were two tables-- the small one used a lot of heavy blocks in the base to make it massive, and I think it only had sand for isolation, no air legs, and a half a pool table for a top. The other table was nicer-- it had air legs made form inner tubes (works fine) and the surface was a full sized pool table slate that was resting on a bunch of tennis balls laid out in an irregular 2-D array to avoid creating bad resonant modes.

It was in the basement of the dorm that held the college for lefties (within a much larger university) and part of the room was under a stairwell. Most of the time you just had to make sure nobody had come down the stairs in the last few minutes, and do it at an hour when it was reasonably unlikely that someone would come down the stairs during a 1 minute or so exposure. For super stability, there was a setup using a mechanism from an HO railroad track switch, and you would sit outside the room (so as not to disturb the air inside) for a half hour or so, and then make the exposure.

The hardest part of the whole thing was that the spatial filters were made from microscopes turned on their sides, with the pinhole mounted in the stage and the stages tended to drift.

It's quite possible (as other people have mentioned) to make good quality holograms on a budget, and I even believe the $99 kit (and may have to order it just for fun). The biggest problem with that kit is probably the coherence length of the laser, but a little care can probably mitigate that. That, and keeping the cats out of the kitchen while I do it.

I get to play with expensive optics in fancy labs now, but you can still get bad results if you don't use them carefully. A lot of what they save you is time, and the other thing you get is higher precision, but you don't need super precision for visible holograms--a tenth of a wave or so and you can probably get nice results.

Re:Gives a new meaning to porn

[budgenator]

The problem would be that film usualy isn't real sensitive to the color of light that lasers put out, and the amount of light to expose a sceen with actors is pretty large, compareing the output of 1KW movie lighting to a 5mW laser means exposure times would be at least 20,000 times longer, you'd get;

Porn movie director: OK we are going to shoot frame 1, sceen 1, cast into postion!
Actors: ok we are ready!
Director: when I say action, you can't move or even breath for 30 min.
Actors: Hey there is noting in our contracts about holding our breath for a half hour!
Director: we told you that it was a 3 minute sceen and and that means we have to shoot 4320 frames, and each frame has to be exposed for a half hour.
Actors: so how long is this sceen going to take to complete?
Director: If everybody cooperates, and we shoot arround the clock, about ninety days

You might be able to do something interesting using stop-motion and models