September 26, 2003

To create a conventional holographic recording you need to use lasers and complicated optical systems, however Rosen and his students, David Abookasis and Youzhi Li, are using a standard digital camera to create holograms. How can they do that? First, they take a set of many pictures of the 3-D object from different points of view. Then, the set of pictures is sent to a computer and mathematically processed with a new algorithm they developed. The computer output is a hologram that can be printed out on a hardcopy transparency or on a screen. When the hologram is properly illuminated, a real 3D image of the original object is reconstructed in front of the viewer's eyes.

This hologram is not related to other non-laser holograms, like multiplex or stereoscopic holograms, which work by supplying two different images, one for each eye. According to Rosen, those types don’t mimic a 3D scene completely... for instance, they can’t capture all the ways in which objects in the hologram come into focus at different distances and angles from the observer. Rosen believes their hologram is the only non-laser technique that recovers all the 3D effects of the original scene.

Creating a hologram using your digital camera is on the horizon...

More information about this new technique for creating holograms will be presented at the Optical Society of America’s Frontiers in Optics 2003, a conference providing up-to-the-minute advancements in optics and photonics research, taking place October 5th to 9th, 2003, at the Hilton Tucson El Conquistador in Tucson, AZ.

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