YHK - yet another hacker news clone

Whatever became of holography? (2011)

53 points cainxinth 1 hour ago 17 comments

Nition 1 hour ago | parent

I went to a whole art exhibition of holograms as a kid that blew me away, and I've always wondered why holograms are so rare ever since. I had one for a while, the famous one of the microsope with the lens that you can actually look through to see a computer chip inside. There's nothing else like it.

moron4hire 56 minutes ago | parent

I suspect, for your typical art nerd, holography is prohibitively expensive and limiting in expressiveness. And for your typical tech nerd, it's also prohibitively expensive and limiting in expressiveness.

Nition 28 minutes ago | parent

Probably true, but I reckon there's surely at least some money to be made for a commercial enterprise if anyone wanted to go big, and nobody has. Get the price down via mass production and automation. Get some holograms into the shops. Sell them in an online store (you can buy holograms online already, but only a few from small operators at high prices, or second-hand). Let people send you their 3D models or 3D scenes and you'll send them a hologram of it. You can even do short animations (there's nothing stopping every new perspective being a different frame!). Have your AI convert people's photos to 3D and then output a hologram of them.

You do need to have a decent point light to shine on it, but you can sell that too. You can even sell a frame that has a clip-on light that's just right[1], although a perfect lighting setup is not required.

[1] Like Dutch Holographic Laboratory does: https://holoprint.com/pages/components.php#Telescope

daniel_reetz 1 hour ago | parent

There's a phenomenal book on this topic called "Holographic Visions" (ISBN 978-0198571223).

I've had the pleasure of working behind the scenes on holography related stuff (primarily optomechanics) for years now. Fascinating field full of phenomenally interesting minds.

s0rce 1 hour ago | parent

I got to make one during a visit to the MIT museum maybe 25 years ago, was neat.

case540 1 hour ago | parent

3blue1brown’s video on holography is one of the coolest math videos I’ve ever seen. Basically magic.

midnitewarrior 1 hour ago | parent

I wanted to pick up doing holography again, but I discovered that Integraf, founded by legend TJ ( https://www.integraf.com/about/tung-h-jeong ), stopped selling the film and supplies.

Much of the supply chain for modern hobbyist holography was sourced out of Russia, and the ongoing wars have made those materials unavailable.

There are some newer processes out there, but there were probably thousands of us that grew up using those HoloKit holography kits distributed by TJ.

JKCalhoun 31 minutes ago | parent

What is unique about the film and supplies?

krenzo 17 minutes ago | parent

You can get holographic film and kits from http://www.litiholo.com. These are not silver halide but are Covestro Bayfol HX photopolymer film which require no post processing.

oliculipolicula 8 minutes ago | parent

And a battery powered laser

https://youtu.be/P5VEu77qe4Q

zoeysmithe 44 minutes ago | parent

They always felt gimmicky to me, like something out of a kid's museum, and I imagine I'm not the only one.

Its this odd often blurry and hard to see thing that certainly has interesting aspects but is not something you can create easily at home, unlike a photograph. Then the world changed and mobile devices ruled and everyone had a good camera sensor in their pocket, TVs were thinner and higher resolution than ever, games started looking amazing, etc and there really wasn't any room for less practical things like holograms.

I think its one of those things we just weirdly romanticize like a car that is also a boat or a jetpack, but in reality has no real place as a consumer product.

JKCalhoun 29 minutes ago | parent

There were different degrees of quality with holograms. To my recollection, a hologram on glass, that you illuminated with a laser, were stunning in clarity and sense of three dimensionality.

All other variants were degrees of magnitude worse.

tootie 18 minutes ago | parent

I had the opportunity to work with a lenticular display a few years back. Just takes an HDMI input and can render a 3d scene like you'd build in Unity and you'd be able to see at least a range of aspects of the image at once by looking from different angles. Not fully 360 but maybe 90 degrees of perspective at once. It was neat but we spent weeks trying to make an impressive demo and none of it was fun for more than 5 seconds.

ggm 18 minutes ago | parent

Monochromatic laser light makes these things look other-worldly. They look amazing and they look increadible, but its not even close to uncanny valley it's so unreal.

ubj 15 minutes ago | parent

Dan Smalley's research lab at BYU is actively developing 3D volumetric holography technology.

https://youtu.be/N12i_FaHvOU?is=ga1JdDoZKGOm92wz

The video is a bit old, but it has a few fun demos of the capabilities they've developed.

colordrops 5 minutes ago | parent

Seems fun but also no idea how that could be scaled or made to work in consumer products.