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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."
Do Not Stare At Laser With Remaining Eye.
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.
Please state the nature of your medical emergency.
"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).
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.
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.
"...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman
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.
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