Holography: From Physics to The Big Screen

The technical evolution of film industry is one notable feature of modern civilization. The innovation of combining motion pictures with recorded sound. Black-and-white film gradually replaced by the colour motion picture film and the visual effect involve the integration of live-action footage and computer generated imagery to create a scenes which look realistic, but would be dangerous, costly or impossible to be recorded and the popularization of three-dimensional cinema. The developments of technique contribute the film industry to get closer to people’s perception, however, in the real life. The observation of objects would change if we look from different distance and angle. And this experience of perception cannot be done in film. Because of the lack of stereoscopic impression of film images, it limits our sense so that the actual we see might be different.

In 1920s, Sergei Eisenstein had predicted that the future of cinematography was tridimensional and there are many other film pioneers hold the same view. What most film histories leave out is that the Lumière Brothers were trying to achieve a three-dimensional image, Louis Lumière eventually re-shot L’Arrivée d’un Train with a stereoscopic film camera and exhibited it (along with a series of other 3D shorts) at French Academy of Science. The films were shot in two views of the scene and then printing the film in two different colors and combining them with layered film on one reel.

S3D (Stereoscopic 3D) film with better use of polarization systems were invited in 1930s and shown in the public in 1950s, however, after this initial huge excitement, S3D films were not widely recognized. Although the polarized stereoscopic film technology have been improved in all possible...

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...nounced that they developed a generator of holograms on a board with a circuit that generates holograms on the LCD panel.

The holography had demonstrated its potential. Now holograms are not so distant future any more. The idea of the holographic movies started becoming popular among filmmakers. Andrei Tarkovsky said, "The most important thing for cinema is for it to become holographic".

A hologram can be made not only with the light waves of a laser, but also with sound waves and other waves in the electro-magnetic spectrum. Acoustical holography can see through solid objects by using sound waves. Microwave holography detects images by recording the object’s radio waves. Some holograms made with ultraviolet light can record an image of particle such as atom or molecule.

Holography is one of the most significant discoveries humankind has ever made.