Ok, I have read quite a few post but wanted to start a thread on everyone's experience on digital holography. I believe in this thread we should keep it to successful systems that are working with photo's if possible. It should also be fairly easy such that it could be built by us that dont have machine shops, acecss to loads of money, etc.
What kind of hologram did you make with it?
What digital means are you using to create the hologram?
What equipment did you buy or did you disect/extract etc to build the unit?
What sofware runs your camera if any?
Any other helpful details.
Obviously, and I am sure some may not want to share their hard work, this is to allow holographers not doing digital to become familliar with it such that they may start making digital holograms. Personally, me for one. I really have some cool stuff to do that can only be captured on computer.
Digital Holography
Digital Holography
While this imaging method isnt really new, it the technology thats newly avalible ie...pico projector, photo frame driver, HD Flip camer (by Cisco).Johnfp wrote:Ok, I believe in this thread we should keep it to successful systems that are working with photo's if possible. It should also be fairly easy such that it could be built by us that dont have machine shops, acecss to loads of money, etc.
What kind of hologram did you make with it?
So far only a couple test transmission shots 32 slits @1/4inch width
What digital means are you using to create the hologram?
projecting successive 2D images onto a frosted screen
What equipment did you buy or did you disect/extract etc to build the unit?
the simple task of removing the optics from a Pico 201 projector (thanks to Justin) and sending in a laser beam. The actual 2d are stored on an SD card,then this card is plugged into a digital HD photo frame and this has the ability to drive the images thru the Pico projector
What sofware runs your camera if any?
i have a 4 relay board. and it runs on its own program (see previous posts)
Any other helpful details.
to capture real life images im using an Flip HD video camera on a slide, the camera's software is great as there's an option to grab snapshots directly from the HD video
Its funny, i couldnt wait till the day i could make holographic images thru my computer, now that i can, I cant decide on what to shoot next ?
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Jeffrey Weil
Digital Holography
Hello Everyone,
I know many people here are going to disagree with this. I've had this discussion with holographers before and most disagree but I'm going to post this anyway as I really believe it to be true.
By “digital holography” I guess your all talking about making stereograms with projection systems other than film. Possibly also using digital content creation tools, 3D modeling programs and such. But mainly that term is about the displaying of images during the holographic stage in creating a stereogram.
There is another way to go about this. LCD and DMM devices are amazing, and quick. If your in production and need to make lots of stereograms quickly or within very reliable time frames that's the way to go.
And in a way they're kind of easy. Sure you have to do all that pre-holography work. Software, panels, etc.... But once that's all together no more registration problems and all the rest of the benefits we always talk about as holographers.
Going digital is also sexy in a techi way. Very cool indeed. Way cooler than film.
But, film is just so much higher quality, and so much cheaper at first, it's really something to be considered. It doesn't matter how great your panel or mirror gizmo is, it's contrast is no where near films. It's resolution is no where near film and film has no pixel or hogel pattern superimposed over your subject. No matter how much you spend, for those specifications, it's not even close.
Is it as quick as solid state, no...but how many stereograms are you planing on making? If it's less than 1 a week, every week for an extended time, film can easily keep up.
Most of the holographers on this board are artisans and artists. It's not about speed, its about technique and the final resulting image. It's also about cost and with digital stuff being so cool film equipment has never been cheaper.
Using film allows your personal techniques to come through in the final work much more so than digital. Each hologram might be a bit more labor intensive but this is art and hobby. It shouldn't be turn key like a dot matrix machine.
I know some of you are saying you want to use computer models and film is near impossible. It's not and here's an easy way to do it and proof it can look good.
It's the same way holographers have been doing it for 35 years.
Here's a still shot and a video of a stereogram I shot a few years ago with Larry Liberman. I shot these images a long time ago with a simple point and shoot camera. They are not high quality but they hopefully show what I'm talking about.
I also put the images in the gallery section so they don't get buried in this thread. Someone else might want to see them in the future. Here's the link.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3IZ9GhpU6-M
http://holoforum.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=326
We were working together on a tax program for the Russian government. I had put very small stereograms into the tax labels along with other security origination stuff. This was a test run of the system.
This image is only 2x2 inches but look at the details. No digital display device you can put on a holographic table could do this. But a giant monitor shrunk down sure can. We used 3dmax to produce the 100 frames needed to make the final hologram and color separated them in photoshop. Exactly the same as you would if you were going to use a pico projector or an lcd panel during the holographic stage to make a full color image. We then pointed a 16mm Bolex camera at the computer monitor and recorded all the separated images one at a time. The same way people have been making stereograms for close to 40 years.
Nothing new at all. Old non-sexy methods.....still kicks the crap out of a digital display. And back then we were using a small crt monitor. A big, small pitch, lcd screen of today would be even better as the reduction factor would be greater during the 16mm recording resulting in a image even sharper than the one here.
There's also a cost factor. Today you can probably get a 16mm camera and an old film gate to put on the table for less than an lcd panel or a high resolution DMD. You can also shoot the screen, or the real world, with a 35mm camera and make your own projection gate out of another old 35mm camera.
That's what I did for my first stereogram back in the 80's. I made a simple manual gate in a few hours and it worked fine. It was totally manual. I had to go in the lab for all 36 frames and advance the film between exposures and move the master behind its slit. The slit film holder took only 2 days to make.
Much less work and money than going digital at first. You have to ask yourselves how many stereograms your planing on making. Is spending the time and money to have a lower quality image just to gain speed of production worth it? For most artists, I think the answer is no.
I will admit, going with film instead of digital projection means another stepper and all that if your going to automate it, which you really should. But digital or film, either way you need a stepper system to handle the master slit. So, I think adding another axis is less work than all the digital stuff you'll need to make it happen.
Jeffrey Weil
NorthBeach Holography Inc.
I know many people here are going to disagree with this. I've had this discussion with holographers before and most disagree but I'm going to post this anyway as I really believe it to be true.
By “digital holography” I guess your all talking about making stereograms with projection systems other than film. Possibly also using digital content creation tools, 3D modeling programs and such. But mainly that term is about the displaying of images during the holographic stage in creating a stereogram.
There is another way to go about this. LCD and DMM devices are amazing, and quick. If your in production and need to make lots of stereograms quickly or within very reliable time frames that's the way to go.
And in a way they're kind of easy. Sure you have to do all that pre-holography work. Software, panels, etc.... But once that's all together no more registration problems and all the rest of the benefits we always talk about as holographers.
Going digital is also sexy in a techi way. Very cool indeed. Way cooler than film.
But, film is just so much higher quality, and so much cheaper at first, it's really something to be considered. It doesn't matter how great your panel or mirror gizmo is, it's contrast is no where near films. It's resolution is no where near film and film has no pixel or hogel pattern superimposed over your subject. No matter how much you spend, for those specifications, it's not even close.
Is it as quick as solid state, no...but how many stereograms are you planing on making? If it's less than 1 a week, every week for an extended time, film can easily keep up.
Most of the holographers on this board are artisans and artists. It's not about speed, its about technique and the final resulting image. It's also about cost and with digital stuff being so cool film equipment has never been cheaper.
Using film allows your personal techniques to come through in the final work much more so than digital. Each hologram might be a bit more labor intensive but this is art and hobby. It shouldn't be turn key like a dot matrix machine.
I know some of you are saying you want to use computer models and film is near impossible. It's not and here's an easy way to do it and proof it can look good.
It's the same way holographers have been doing it for 35 years.
Here's a still shot and a video of a stereogram I shot a few years ago with Larry Liberman. I shot these images a long time ago with a simple point and shoot camera. They are not high quality but they hopefully show what I'm talking about.
I also put the images in the gallery section so they don't get buried in this thread. Someone else might want to see them in the future. Here's the link.
http://holoforum.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=326
We were working together on a tax program for the Russian government. I had put very small stereograms into the tax labels along with other security origination stuff. This was a test run of the system.
This image is only 2x2 inches but look at the details. No digital display device you can put on a holographic table could do this. But a giant monitor shrunk down sure can. We used 3dmax to produce the 100 frames needed to make the final hologram and color separated them in photoshop. Exactly the same as you would if you were going to use a pico projector or an lcd panel during the holographic stage to make a full color image. We then pointed a 16mm Bolex camera at the computer monitor and recorded all the separated images one at a time. The same way people have been making stereograms for close to 40 years.
Nothing new at all. Old non-sexy methods.....still kicks the crap out of a digital display. And back then we were using a small crt monitor. A big, small pitch, lcd screen of today would be even better as the reduction factor would be greater during the 16mm recording resulting in a image even sharper than the one here.
There's also a cost factor. Today you can probably get a 16mm camera and an old film gate to put on the table for less than an lcd panel or a high resolution DMD. You can also shoot the screen, or the real world, with a 35mm camera and make your own projection gate out of another old 35mm camera.
That's what I did for my first stereogram back in the 80's. I made a simple manual gate in a few hours and it worked fine. It was totally manual. I had to go in the lab for all 36 frames and advance the film between exposures and move the master behind its slit. The slit film holder took only 2 days to make.
Much less work and money than going digital at first. You have to ask yourselves how many stereograms your planing on making. Is spending the time and money to have a lower quality image just to gain speed of production worth it? For most artists, I think the answer is no.
I will admit, going with film instead of digital projection means another stepper and all that if your going to automate it, which you really should. But digital or film, either way you need a stepper system to handle the master slit. So, I think adding another axis is less work than all the digital stuff you'll need to make it happen.
Jeffrey Weil
NorthBeach Holography Inc.
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Dinesh
Digital Holography
No trick or special effects or video enhancements. No mist. This is what you see: a dragon free floating in space and a teapot, also free floating, pouring tea. The images are rendered with Blender. You can see the images in full sunlight.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zgcKKgQPjuw
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Nq4ri2t ... er&list=UL
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zgcKKgQPjuw
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Nq4ri2t ... er&list=UL
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Johnfp
Digital Holography
Jeffrey, I totally get what you're saying and I would have to say, without seeing one made from an LCD I would have to agree with you. After I make my first one from the transmission LCD that I have, I will try to make one from film for comparison.
Now for a few questions if you don't mind.
Did you use a disposable camera for your "point and shoot" shots?
Did you use black and white or color film? I surely assume B/W.
35mm?
DId you process the film yourself or did you have it processed out of house?
Was the filme the reverse filme for slides or the regular positive film and you used some inverting technique.
Hope these questions are not too infringement on your business but using film does bring them up in my mind.
Have a good day.
John
Now for a few questions if you don't mind.
Did you use a disposable camera for your "point and shoot" shots?
Did you use black and white or color film? I surely assume B/W.
35mm?
DId you process the film yourself or did you have it processed out of house?
Was the filme the reverse filme for slides or the regular positive film and you used some inverting technique.
Hope these questions are not too infringement on your business but using film does bring them up in my mind.
Have a good day.
John
Digital Holography
I started writing this last week, finished today, and now the man himself is here to clean up what I got wrong or clarify matters!
The digital system I had experience with was designed and built by Craig Newswanger for CFC, and I had the pleasure of feeding it plates. It used a Texas Instruments Digital Mirror Device, a couple of achromats served as the projection lens onto a diffuser that wasn’t a ground glass but would scramble polarization and if you touched it the stuff would come off on your finger, forgot who made it. This was from over 7 years ago!
The screen was viewed by a plateholder tilted at the alpha or achromatic angle to make the H1. A collimated beam impinged perpendicularly on the plate, and that worked just fine with a no shrinkage processing. Distances were described by the Benton math.
The slit translation was provided by stepper motors and ran on software Craig designed. He is the master of automation, as he had been an Imagineer at Disney! Three passes of the slits were done, as the software color-separated the images into RGB channels, so there were three passes at the top, middle and bottom of the plate. 150 exposures altogether!
The H1 was transferred into photo-resist, so all the work was done at 458 nm from a Coherent Sabre. A “beam-stealing” mirror was kinematically positioned into the beam path to switch from the mastering set up to the transfer set up, all setup on an 8’ by 12’ (if I remember correctly) table. Very little adjustments ever needed to be done to the system, just resizing and the attendant re-focusing.
Software was written by Craig, and ran on a Windows 98 machine. The “pre-press” was done in Adobe After Effects, which saved the image as a TIFF sequence of 50 images. The job, usually security or logo stuff, was usually layers like 2D/3D stuff, but once in a while we would do 3D renderings or captures with a shear camera. We did a super portrait of Craig’s wife, Sally Weber! I always thought that this system would be excellent for CD covers, but the sales department and management looked at me like I was nuts, but then again, they were all a bunch of pinheads!
This system is still in operation, two of my former students from SAIC are still there, making more money than I but more than likely not as happy as myself. Examples of what this system is capable of that you might have seen are Harry Potter cards of early 2000’s vintage, some Intel chip boxes, Beanie Baby labels, etc. Kudos to Cragi for developing such a bullet proof system!
PS. For a few shekels, I would consult and help anyone else set up a system like this!
The digital system I had experience with was designed and built by Craig Newswanger for CFC, and I had the pleasure of feeding it plates. It used a Texas Instruments Digital Mirror Device, a couple of achromats served as the projection lens onto a diffuser that wasn’t a ground glass but would scramble polarization and if you touched it the stuff would come off on your finger, forgot who made it. This was from over 7 years ago!
The screen was viewed by a plateholder tilted at the alpha or achromatic angle to make the H1. A collimated beam impinged perpendicularly on the plate, and that worked just fine with a no shrinkage processing. Distances were described by the Benton math.
The slit translation was provided by stepper motors and ran on software Craig designed. He is the master of automation, as he had been an Imagineer at Disney! Three passes of the slits were done, as the software color-separated the images into RGB channels, so there were three passes at the top, middle and bottom of the plate. 150 exposures altogether!
The H1 was transferred into photo-resist, so all the work was done at 458 nm from a Coherent Sabre. A “beam-stealing” mirror was kinematically positioned into the beam path to switch from the mastering set up to the transfer set up, all setup on an 8’ by 12’ (if I remember correctly) table. Very little adjustments ever needed to be done to the system, just resizing and the attendant re-focusing.
Software was written by Craig, and ran on a Windows 98 machine. The “pre-press” was done in Adobe After Effects, which saved the image as a TIFF sequence of 50 images. The job, usually security or logo stuff, was usually layers like 2D/3D stuff, but once in a while we would do 3D renderings or captures with a shear camera. We did a super portrait of Craig’s wife, Sally Weber! I always thought that this system would be excellent for CD covers, but the sales department and management looked at me like I was nuts, but then again, they were all a bunch of pinheads!
This system is still in operation, two of my former students from SAIC are still there, making more money than I but more than likely not as happy as myself. Examples of what this system is capable of that you might have seen are Harry Potter cards of early 2000’s vintage, some Intel chip boxes, Beanie Baby labels, etc. Kudos to Cragi for developing such a bullet proof system!
PS. For a few shekels, I would consult and help anyone else set up a system like this!
"We're the flowers in the dustbin" Sex Pistols
Digital Holography
do you every think in our life time they will use computers to generate a Hologram Image not a stereograms?... it does seem like the technologies is getting tighter in resolution and speed in the imaging chips but i know it still way offEd Wesly wrote:I started writing this last week, finished today, and now the man himself is here to clean up what I got wrong or clarify matters!
The digital system I had experience with was designed and built by Craig Newswanger for CFC, and I had the pleasure of feeding it plates. It used a Texas Instruments Digital Mirror Device, a couple of achromats served as the projection lens onto a diffuser that wasn’t a ground glass but would scramble polarization and if you touched it the stuff would come off on your finger, forgot who made it. This was from over 7 years ago!
The screen was viewed by a plateholder tilted at the alpha or achromatic angle to make the H1. A collimated beam impinged perpendicularly on the plate, and that worked just fine with a no shrinkage processing. Distances were described by the Benton math.
The slit translation was provided by stepper motors and ran on software Craig designed. He is the master of automation, as he had been an Imagineer at Disney! Three passes of the slits were done, as the software color-separated the images into RGB channels, so there were three passes at the top, middle and bottom of the plate. 150 exposures altogether!
The H1 was transferred into photo-resist, so all the work was done at 458 nm from a Coherent Sabre. A “beam-stealing” mirror was kinematically positioned into the beam path to switch from the mastering set up to the transfer set up, all setup on an 8’ by 12’ (if I remember correctly) table. Very little adjustments ever needed to be done to the system, just resizing and the attendant re-focusing.
Software was written by Craig, and ran on a Windows 98 machine. The “pre-press” was done in Adobe After Effects, which saved the image as a TIFF sequence of 50 images. The job, usually security or logo stuff, was usually layers like 2D/3D stuff, but once in a while we would do 3D renderings or captures with a shear camera. We did a super portrait of Craig’s wife, Sally Weber! I always thought that this system would be excellent for CD covers, but the sales department and management looked at me like I was nuts, but then again, they were all a bunch of pinheads!
This system is still in operation, two of my former students from SAIC are still there, making more money than I but more than likely not as happy as myself. Examples of what this system is capable of that you might have seen are Harry Potter cards of early 2000’s vintage, some Intel chip boxes, Beanie Baby labels, etc. Kudos to Cragi for developing such a bullet proof system!
PS. For a few shekels, I would consult and help anyone else set up a system like this!
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Dinesh
Digital Holography
Well, we're once more back on the question of what exactly is a "digital" hologram. In the sense of CGH, they're already using a computer to generate a hologram image. There are some excellent papers coming out of Japan on CGH techniques and software, and, in fact, there's a whole section in SPIE on CGH and digital (in the sense of CGH) holography. New techniques and methods are constantly coming out of the cgh community. True, as of now the holograms are pretty small and they take several hours/days to write, but it's only a matter of time before the process speeds up. Consider that only a decade or so ago, the CGH crowd was using Cray machines and today they're doing the same job with desktops!dannybee wrote:do you every think in our life time they will use computers to generate a Hologram Image not a stereograms?... it does seem like the technologies is getting tighter in resolution and speed in the imaging chips but i know it still way off
However, I feel that in order to get real-time CGH, there needs to be a fundamental shift in mathematical techniques. Consider a 2x2 inch hologram shot in transmission mode with a HeNe with a reference of 30 degrees. In this situation, the fringe separation is roughly 1.2 microns (lambda/sin(theta) = 0.633/0.5 ~ 1.2microns) Applying the Shannon Theorem, this means that the hologram has to be scanned at 1.66 per micron, or that a feature size of 0.6 microns needs to be overlayed onto the hologram. Remembering that this is a 2-dimensional overlay and assuming a byte per overlay, this comes to about a terabyte or so to reconstruct the entire hologram. For real-time animation, this means a data stream of roughly 24 terabytes/sec. To scrunch at this level, I believe some sort of fractal method is required, since I don't believe that this kind of data compression can be achieved by just Von-Neumann techniques.
I've been thinking along these lines for a year or so and I'm trying to come up with a mathematical formalism.
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Johnfp
Digital Holography
Hey Jeffrey, I was also thinking...If we use an LCD and it refreshes at 60 cycles per second then what happens in between those cycles? Does it allow the light to go fully through the display (pixel on) or block the though light (pixel off). If the first hold true then it seems we will lose contrast as light is coming through for a short time where it shoudl be blocked. If the latter, then we may have to increase the brightness of the object beam (the LCD image). It may just be that the pixel is refreshed and if it does not change then nothing happens. In that case, the above was serious overthinking. I tried to research what happens to the pixels in during refreshes but could not find anything.
This is something you don't need to worry about with film.
This is something you don't need to worry about with film.
Digital Holography
ther are ones that do full frame no cycles, so that its not in the interlace mode....but full frame (P mode) .. would think you would not want it in the interlace mode.... check your mode display (driver) for that monitorJohnfp wrote:Hey Jeffrey, I was also thinking...If we use an LCD and it refreshes at 60 cycles per second then what happens in between those cycles? Does it allow the light to go fully through the display (pixel on) or block the though light (pixel off). If the first hold true then it seems we will lose contrast as light is coming through for a short time where it shoudl be blocked. If the latter, then we may have to increase the brightness of the object beam (the LCD image). It may just be that the pixel is refreshed and if it does not change then nothing happens. In that case, the above was serious overthinking. I tried to research what happens to the pixels in during refreshes but could not find anything.
This is something you don't need to worry about with film.