Specular Holography: How (2010) | Hacker News Reader

Specular Holography: How (2010)

zintaglio.com

53 pointsmatthberg14 comments

This is light on details if I haven’t missed a link to another page or something.

Definitely browse the links to the images in the „See:“ section of the submitted page though - the images and videos on the knots and nature pages are beautiful!

Maybe there are useful references in the Wikipedia article:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Specular_holography

Edit: maybe this, even though the page is awful to use on mobile: http://amasci.com/amateur/holohint.html

early dent-oriented shaders

When I was a kid in the 90s my parents took me to some sort of art gallery hidden upstairs above other shops, that was doing a hologram exhibition (wavefront holograms, not specular ones like in this article). It was dark inside and they had a whole lot of amazing large format holograms of various things lit up.

I kind of wonder why holograms of all types aren't more popular. It's still amazing to see a 3D image on a 2D plane that you can look at from different angles.

I spent ten minutes the other day trying to buy any laser hologram, and as far as I can tell the market just does not exist at all outside of "call us" pricing for science museums and such. Also doesn't help that the word "hologram" has been watered down to uselessness by competing technologies.

Yep exactly, that's my experience as well. And I think the other reply saying it's possible to find them on eBay is kind of missing the point. Anywhere you can buy them is kind of obscure or unofficial.

I don't understand why something so cool, that keeps working forever, is so relatively rare.

I think the only other one I've seen in the wild since that exhibition in the 90s that wasn't some tiny thing, was a Lord Of The Rings one that Weta Workshop had given to a lecturer of mine.

Ten minutes! Wow.

Did you check eBay? There are definitely examples for sale there. Holography-specific groups have hints on where to buy some too. The popular ones are hard to find, but you can make them yourself at home or find less sophisticated pieces for sale occasionally.

This wasn’t in Chicago, perchance, was it? There was a lovely museum of holography there that I was lucky enough to visit in the early 2000’s before it closed. Your description reminds me of that.

No, but that sounds like a place I would have enjoyed.

Steve Mould's video gives an accessible explanation and good sense of what these objects feel like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sv-38lwV6vc

A page from 1995 about this topic. http://amasci.com/amateur/holo1.html

Cheers! That's got to be one of the best pages on the internet.

Applied Science has some amazing explanation and application of these principles on tempered chocolate: https://youtu.be/UsDnkrDvkBo

After seeing the "lumographic lens" video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oiDqUkmozlM) I managed to dig up some interesting research on what is basically a method of milling a "lens" to project an image at an arbitrary focal point using light convergence for "white" and divergence for "dark.

https://cdfg.mit.edu/publications/fabricating-microgeometry-...

https://cdfg.mit.edu/publications/goal-based-caustics

https://cs.dartmouth.edu/~wjarosz/publications/papas11goal.m...

https://cdfg.mit.edu/publications/ in general has a considerable amount of interesting publications regarding computational design and fabrication of neat optical effects.

As does https://web.archive.org/web/20140623052716/http://lgg.epfl.c...

>Caustics are captivating light patterns created by materials bundling or diverting light by refraction or reflection. We know caustics as random side effects, appearing, for example, at the bottom of a swimming pool. In this work we show that it is possible to control caustic patterns to form almost any desired shape by optimizing the geometry of the reflective or refractive surface generating the caustic. We demonstrate how this surprising result offers a new perspective on light control and the use of caustics as an inspiring design element. Several produced prototypes illustrate that physical realizations of such optimized geometry are feasible.

Now redirects to https://www.epfl.ch/labs/gcm/publications/

Is this not akin to https://www.researchgate.net/publication/231068500_Oriental_... (if the mirror wasn’t covered by a polished front?)

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