Technology Trends

A team of researchers at University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center has developed the first true, three-dimensional, holographic movies. These movies should appear on a screen near you in about a decade. For the moment, the initial markets for this holographic television system will be in medical visualization and military applications. The system is based on regular digital light processing (DLP) micro-mirror chips, but there is a twist. Instead of using regular lights, the researchers are using laser lights, which are using a unique wavelength. And they feed the chip with interferograms coming from regular 3-D imaging applications. This unique combination leads the micro-mirrors to project a 3-D moving image that appears suspended in air, like a 3-D hologram. Read more today, or wait until 2020…

Here is the introduction of the UT Southwestern Medical Center news release about this future projection system.

In a small research laboratory at UT Southwestern Medical Center, a grainy, red movie of circling fighter jets emerges from a table-top black box, while nearby, a video of a rotating human heart hangs suspended in a tank of gooey gel.

These images - the first true, three-dimensional, holographic movies - are the brainchild of Dr. Harold “Skip” Garner, professor of biochemistry and internal medicine at UT Southwestern.

Below are three images showing the — early — technology at work (Credit: UT Southwestern Medical Center). You’ll find more explanations below.

So when will be able to watch holographic television in our living rooms?

“An important next step is to take our proof of principle technology that we have now and move it into a commercial entity,” said Dr. Garner. “We think the two initial markets will be in medical visualization and military applications, such as heads-up displays for helmets and military aircraft and coordinating battlefield information.”

In the long term, Dr. Garner said, entertainment uses could include 3-D multiplayer games, theme park or advertising displays, and “Holo TV.” He and his colleagues have worked with students in Southern Methodist University’s Cox School of Business to develop a tentative business plan that explores the possible commercialization of the technology, focusing on medical applications.

“I predict that by the year 2020, that being the year of ‘perfect vision,’ we will have Holo TV in our homes,” said Dr. Michael Huebschman, a postdoctoral researcher in Dr. Garner’s lab and one of the developers of the technology.

Back in 2005, the “What’s New” section of Popular Science dated June 16, 2005, carries a special report named “The Future Starts Here,” which takes “a look at five unbelievable technologies trucking toward reality” and includes a very interesting article about the “Holographic Television.”

For more technical information, you should read this page about Holographic Imaging from Skip Garner’s lab, which also has links to several video demonstrations.

Finally, you should read a paper published by Optics Express in March 2003, “Dynamic holographic 3-D image projection” (Vol. 11, No. 5, pp. 437-445). Here is a link to the full paper (PDF format, 9 pages, 1.69 MB). The images above are extracted from this paper.

Sources: UT Southwestern Medical Center news release, June 14, 2005; Jonathan Keats, Popular Science, June 16, 2005; and various sites

Related stories can be found in the following categories.

• Displays
  
  
• Future
  
  
• Holograms
  
  
• Innovation
  
  
• Medicine
  
  
• Military Applications
  

In this short article, eWEEK writes that the next generation of biosensors will consist of small holograms costing only fractions of a cent. Prototypes developed by a U.K. company, aptly named Smart Holograms, include contact lenses that monitor glucose levels or thin badges that detect alcohol levels. Not only these holograms used as sensors will be cheap to produce, they’ll also require less training for nurses or police officers. This is because these holograms can be designed to show results graphically, such as morphing into an image of a green car if someone subjected to breath analysis is sober and can drive. Read more…

Here are selected quotes from the eWEEK article.

Prototypes have already been made for contact lenses that monitor glucose levels, thin badges that detect alcohol levels, and sticks that can tell, instantly, if milk has spoiled or become contaminated. The technology promises to be quicker and cheaper than tests used today. It will also require less training, because the hologram itself can be designed to show results graphically.

A test showing that fuel has been contaminated with trace amounts of water reads “dry” or “wet.” In a breath alcohol test intended for police offices, suspects breathe onto tiny cards that either show a green automobile or a red X, establishing whether a person is sober enough to drive.

This technology looks cheap and promising, according to Chris Lowe, a professor at Cambridge University, and co-founder of Smart Holograms.

One advantage of the technology is that each hologram costs only a fraction of a cent to produce. Another is the wide applicability. The holograms can detect pH to four decimal places and chemical concentrations of hormones and other biologically important substances. The samples tested do not need to be pure: The holograms can work in milk or even in stool samples from newborns, said Lowe.

Now, let’s turn to the company itself to see how holograms can be turned into biosensors. Here are some explanations provided on this page whose title is “Creating a Sensor Hologram.”

Sensors that rely on the ability of “smart” polymers to swell or contract when in contact with specific biological reagents, chemicals or physical forces, sometimes called volume holograms, are of significant interest. For example, bright wavelength changes produced by holograms fabricated in hydrophilic polymers offer immediate advantages as a facile and reliable means of measuring volume changes. Hologram gratings capable of exhibiting spectral effects from volume changes need to be of the so-called “Denisyuk” type.

For more information about Yuri Denisyuk, you can read this brief history of the holography.

[The figure above] illustrates the experimental set-up used to create Denisyuk-type holograms. Laser light returning from a plane mirror creates a classical standing wave pattern of nodes and antinodes or interference fringes spaced half a wavelength apart. The standing wave pattern is recorded in the polymer matrix that has been coated on a plastic substrate or glass microscope slide. After a conventional photographic development step, the fringe pattern is represented as a distribution of ultrafine (<20 nm diameter) grains of silver.

Is this technology as accurate as told by its promoters? We’ll see. However, it really seems it has a serious cost advantage over current technologies, so it has the potential to become widely used in a few years.

Sources: M.L. Baker, eWEEK, February 19, 2005; Smart Holograms website

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• Biotechnology
  
  
• Holograms
  
  
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It’s not the first time I’m telling you about pocket projectors (check here for example). But now, a small UK company, Light Blue Optics, has developed an holographic projector so small that it could be integrated into your laptop or even your cell phone. In “Holographic projector for your future PDA,” PDA Live.com writes that the holographic laser technology used by the company relies on very few components, meaning these future projectors should be cheap to produce. The company says these projectors should be on the market in the next two to four years. Read more…

Here are the key excerpts from the article.

The company’s new technology requires only a very few components, which means the projector can be made relatively cheap and very small, so that it could be integrated any portable device. The company also created as special chip that is capable of generating and displaying high quality holograms at video frame rates.

How does it work? A hologram pattern, which to the naked eye looks like a collection of random dots, is displayed on a small liquid-crystal-on-silicon (LCOS) microdisplay - a tiny, very fast liquid crystal display built on top of a chip. The hologram patterns are calculated by Light Blue Optics’ proprietary “hologram chip” so that when the microdisplay is illuminated by laser light, the light interferes with itself in a complex manner through the physical process of diffraction which, when carefully controlled, results in the formation of a large, high quality projected image on, for example, a screen or a wall.

The company showed a working prototype at St John’s Innovation Press Day in Cambridge, UK, in November 2004. It also issued this press release.

And when will products be in the shops? The company answers.

At present, Light Blue Optics has a lab-based demonstrator, which converts a standard composite video signal into high-quality 2D holographic video, in real time. The hologram generation engine runs in a commercially available FPGA (field-programmable gate array) chip, whose design extends naturally to cheap mass production. Other processing platforms including low-power digital signal processing (DSP) ICs are also under development.

Light Blue Optics is working with several strategic partners to further develop this technology into real products. It is envisaged that devices based on this technology will be in the shops in the next two to four years.

I can’t wait for Christmas 2006.

Source: PDA Live.com, December 27, 2004; and various websites

Related stories can be found in the following categories.

• Displays
  


• Handhelds
  


• Holograms
  


• Vision and Visualization
  

Researchers from Seoul National University have developed a full-color autostereoscopic three-dimensional display, which can be viewed without glasses, according to this short article from Technology Research News. They used a set of six holograms to generate 3D images and video. The system, which is 60 centimeters long, generates slightly different images for the left and right eyes to produce a three-dimensional effect. Such a system could come to market within five years to be used for video broadcasting or in medical and military applications. Read more…

The autostereoscopic system consists of red, green, and blue laser diodes, a liquid-crystal spatial light modulator and a projection lens, and is 60 centimeters long. It generates slightly different images for the left and right eyes to produce the effect of natural three-dimensional vision.

Rather than three-dimensional holograms, which are difficult to calculate, the system produces two-dimensional red, green and blue holograms for each eye. These holograms are reproduced by shining a laser through a liquid-crystal display that shows the holograms’ light and dark patterns.

The researchers’ system shines red, green and blue lasers through a single liquid crystal light modulator, which switches rapidly among the six hologram patterns. The three color holograms for each eye overlap to produce a full-color image. The output is focused through a lens to direct the two images to the left and right eyes.

[Note: In the above diagram, CDC stands for "color-dispersion-compensated" and SPH for "synthetic phase hologram."]

What will be this relatively cheap system will be used for?

The three-dimensional displays could eventually be used to display any type of dynamic data for use in entertainment, art, medicine, and military applications.

[And with] a parallel processing computer system and a specialized chip, the method could be used for real-time three-dimensional broadcasting, according to the researchers.

The research work has been published by Optics Express under the long title “Full-color autostereoscopic 3D display system using color-dispersion-compensated synthetic phase holograms.”

Here are two links to the abstract and to the full paper (PDF format, 8 pages, 886 KB). The above diagrams were extracted from this paper.

Sources: Technology Research News, November 18, 2004; Optics Express, Vol. 12, No. 21, Pages 5229-5236, October 18, 2004

Related stories can be found in the following categories.

• Displays
  
  
• Holograms
  
  
• Vision