Whatever became of holography? (2011)(americanscientist.org) |
Whatever became of holography? (2011)(americanscientist.org) |
The main challenge is that there are, to my knowledge, only two remaining manufacturers of the plates - in France, and in Russia.
The video is a bit old, but it has a few fun demos of the capabilities they've developed.
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.
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
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.
Though that also is part of the reason that a they're not more common. Each hologram is the film rather than a "print".
If someone wants to make 100 holograms to be able to sell them as more than a one off art piece you're making 100 units of the film.
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.
All other variants were degrees of magnitude worse.
There was a short-lived flurry of art establishment interest in high quality glass holograms, but the process is just too expensive and fragile to create non-niche art.
I always expected that at some point we'd have dynamic holographic displays, but the processing and resolution requirements are insane.
Holographic film has a resolution in the region of 100,000 to 250,000 ppi, which is quite a bit more than 300dpi for print or a few thousand PPI for plain old film. If you could build a 27" display with that resolution you'd need maybe 1TB per frame at a minimum.
You could probably apply quite a bit of compression to get that down on input, but that's still the order of a workable frame store memory.
Multiply by three for colour.
Oh hey, I have worked in exactly this business (taking people's random 3D models and bullying a rendering pipeline into feeding a digital holographic printer). It's hard, for many reasons. Mainly it's that holograms are expensive in materials, labor, and capital outlay (adding up to several k just for something the size of a piece of paper), and mass production of digital holograms isn't really possible without massive further outlay - writing them is time consuming, and copying them is fraught. It's like being a graphic design / print workshop, except everything is way more fiddly and expensive and nobody wants your product.
Analog holograms are a bit more tractable. But that's even more niche on the consumption end.