Real-time holographic video displays could be near

Holograms may seem like an original invention from some science fiction films. A famous scene often mentioned in this context is that from Star Wars where Princess Leia records an important holographic message, ending with the words “Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi“.

Such visions of holograms aren’t fiction. In a paper published in Nature, Nasser Peyghambarian, Pierre-Alexandre Blanche and colleagues from the College of Optical Sciences at The University of Arizona demonstrate a holographic system that is capable of displaying holograms at speeds approaching almost that of video capability. (and sure enough, they do mention Star Wars in the abstract of the paper…)

Holograms have been invented in 1947 by Dennis Gabor. They are made by shining a laser beam on an object and then recording the laser light reflected by the object on a photographic film. Simultaneously, a reference beam of the same laser is directly guided to the photographic film, where it causes an interference of the two beams. The interference pattern stored in the photographic film not only contains information on the light intensity (as in conventional photos) but also the phase difference between the two laser beams. The phase difference is a measure of the three-dimensional shape of the object. Together, intensity and phase contain the complete information of a light beam.

{ All That Matters | Continue reading }

photo { Ryan Bailey }

technology, visual design | November 3rd, 2010