Holograms May Make 3D Video a Reality
The next generation of digital entertainment could bring entertainers into your living room as full-sized 3D holograms, bring cell phone voicemails to life with tiny images of callers or bring you face-to-face with Super Mario himself. It's an exciting time for physicists and other researchers who have spent decades trying to expand the applications of holography, the creation and manipulation of 3D images made by bouncing laser light around.
Last month, a team of researchers at the University of Arizona unveiled a critical breakthrough toward the elusive goal of holographic video, developing a technology that allows holograms to be rewritable for the first time. This allows 3D images to be changed many times per second, just like the frames in a movie.
Nasser Peyghambarian, chairman of photonics and lasers at Arizona University, said the rewritable holographic technology his team developed is the first step toward video applications for holograms. "It is not yet suitable for 3D movies, but I believe we will be able to get to that capability," he said, adding that holographic video would require the image to be rewritten 50 times per second or so, while the current technology allows rewrites at a pace of only about one per minute.
"The medium we are using is capable of being rewritten every 100 microseconds, far faster than is necessary for video, but there are many other challenges including the technique for rewriting that fast. It is possible to do it, but we certainly can't do it yet. I would suspect it will take several more years to get to that point," Peyghambarian said.
Tung H. Jeong, an author and retired physics professor at Lake Forest College outside Chicago, has studied holography since the technology emerged in the 1960s. "When we start talking about erasable and rewritable holograms, we are moving toward the possibility of holographic TV ... It has now been shown that physically, it's possible," he said.
Although holograms are as common in credit cards, where they long have been used as a security feature, the recent advances allow for a variety of new applications, from large-scale holographic portraiture to virtual input devices for computers.
The "Beam One" interface from Connecticut-based HoloTouch Inc., for example, can project a working image of a keyboard in space. Among other things, the virtual keyboard can allow doctors to enter data into a computer during surgery without risking touching nonsterile surfaces.
InPhase, a Colorado-based spinoff of Lucent, is nearing release of a holographic data storage technology which stores data three dimensionally in multiple layers instead of single layers like CDs and DVDs. Its discs can hold 300 gigabytes of data versus 25 to 50 gigabytes for a Blu-ray high definition DVD. That, the company says, is enough storage to save "50 hours of high definition video on a single disc, 50,000 songs on a postage stamp, or 500,000 X-rays on a credit card."
Infosys Technologies Limited, based in India, was granted U.S. patents in June for technology that would allow holographic video, games and images to be beamed among cell phones. The technology would squeeze the huge amounts of data needed to make holograms through existing communications networks by sending unprocessed data to be turned into holograms once they are received.
Frank DeFreitas, who runs the website holoworld.com, said recent breakthroughs are being embraced by holographers around the world. "There are all sorts of things we can do now and some extraordinary new applications on the horizon. It's an exciting time in the holographic world," he said.
By J. Scott Orr, Digital Life
