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."

Comments

WARNING

[jra]

Do Not Stare At Laser With Remaining Eye.

Re:WARNING

[Steve Max]

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.

Holography's not dead

[Flash Modin]

FermiLab had an awesome holography art show awhile back. There's still some out there. This docu is great though, and Doctor Laser is too. Pretty sweet for a make your own contest.

Doctor Laser?

[Dexter Herbivore]

Please state the nature of your medical emergency.

Real-life Merlin

[woopate]

This is so cool! He comes off as a Wizard or a mad scientist or something. This is a man who is truly passionate about his art. Wish things were looking more up for him, he seems like a cool, optimistic guy. If I lived anywhere near him, I'd probably try to go make friends with him or support his business.

Re:Real-life Merlin

[Psychotria]

Despite being completely ignored by most people he lives in this world in his head where the current president would subject himself to a dark and moldy basement in order to get a half-assed hologram taken.

And that, my friend, is what separates the visionaries, the great artists, the great scientists, the great writers, and the great innovators from the rest of us.

Re:Real-life Merlin

[ultranova]

Despite being completely ignored by most people he lives in this world in his head where the current president would subject himself to a dark and moldy basement in order to get a half-assed hologram taken.

Um, what are you trying to say here? That your president is afraid of the dark?

Besides, getting my holograph taken would be the first thing in my list of things to do if I ever took over the world^W^W^W^W became the president.

Re:Real-life Merlin

[tehcyder]

If I lived anywhere near him, I'd probably try to go make friends with him

Mod parent -1 stalker

Re:OK THAT IS FUCKING ENOUGH

[captaindynamo]

I thought it nice that this was mentioned. The article and the video might not have had the detail you required, but the thats what the google search is for. I've seen holographic images before, and was very interested in how it's accomplished, but it was years ago and I didn't have the resources to look into it further. Sometimes its nice to be reminded of this kind of stuff. For myself, it's led to a night of googling and interesting reading. If its not enough for you, move on to the next article.

Re:Five of the Four Schools in NYC?

[pclminion]

I looked up the definitions of "school" and "studio" in the dictionary. Turns out, they're different words! Weird.

50 years of lasers

[tumutbound]

Lasers were first demonstrated 50 years ago (apparently) There's an exhibition of holograms on at Macquarie University (Sydney, Australia) but if you're too busy to pop in, there's a video of the display here. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RrGR-f1VNHI&feature=player_embedded

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

[blincoln]

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, but there it is again.

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

Re:Holographic movies

[SharpFang]

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.

Re:Holographic movies

[mcgrew]

You're the parent of a bright four year old, aren't you? ;)

Re:holding a candle?

[zippthorne]

Naw, he's oldschool. He obviously uses a spectrometer and a candle to get monochromatic light for his projects. Sure, it requires super-long exposure times, but it's pretty hard-core.

Wait, what?

[chazzf]

In the 1970s there were four schools around the world, and now only a few are left? When you start with four you don't have all that far to drop!

Zebra Imaging in Austin, TX

[Luyseyal]

I happen to know Michael Klug, one of the partners in Zebra Imaging. 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 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

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.