Hacker News Reader

Comment by Nition | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

Maybe if you could figure out a digital work flow with digital development method it could really take off. But holograms are analog and hard to deal with.

The price of entry to kick off digital photography was a fraction of a megapixel, the industry really kicked into high gear around VGA resolution which is about 1/3 of a megapixel and it was VERY plausible for the computers of the time to manipulate it, store it, transmit it, display it, edit it, etc.

A very "entry level" not good but maybe enough to kick off an industry digital transmission hologram would be like "hundreds of gigapixels" or at least dozens and thats not realistic for computers of this time. The super cool reflection holograms are much worse, like "many dozens of terapixels" to even begin to play with.

I guess its good news there are still frontiers of computation out there to reach. A lot of people believed progress would cease when computers could do high enough resolution video, and they're mostly correct, progress has halted for the general public. But if we ever get smart phones with low petabyte fast on device storage and display, those could realistically have "star trek" like transmission holograms.

That beings up some interesting issues WRT RF engineering. Shannons law and all that. Even with unimaginably complex compression algos will something like a hand held hologram video conference (similar to sci fi tropes) ever be possible? Maybe 60 PB/s would not be unreasonable. Consider the LHC only generates about 1 PB/s when its running and that takes a rather large distributed system and a lot of electricity. I don't think video conference holograms will be realistic... Strange thought experiment the only way to do a "holographic video conference" with sane data transfer rates and power levels might be to send the other side a LLM prompt and ask for a locally AI generated video hologram. "Here's 1000 jpeg pictures of me as raw data, render a hologram of me saying 'scotty beam me up'"

The display hardware tech would be pretty wild. I think it could be done but it would require a minimum of 1980s nanotechnology hype. Like DLP but using individual atoms not "large" silicon mirrors.

In summary the MVP for digital photography required early 1990s hardware, but the MVP for digital holograms requires a LOT more than 2020s hardware. Maybe in the 2040s, 2100s, who knows.

Me too, in Munich, must have been late 80s. Friend of mine also had "the book" and we dreamt of building our own lab in my basement. Sandbox on tire tube cushions and all.

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.

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

>Let people send you their 3D models or 3D scenes and you'll send them a hologram of it.

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.

It wasn't that prohibitive. When I did it, I had a helium neon laser recovered from an old supermarket scanner, but it can be done with one of those $10 keychain lasers. The chemicals weren't too expensive, but the holographic plates could get pricey if you wanted a lot of them.

I'd love to see that microscope hologram in person

Reply on news.ycombinator.com